Symbionts (2 page)

From his new vantage point, Tsuyama could see that hundreds of the huge, slow gourd creatures, the entire DalRiss city, were moving now, all traveling in the same direction. The place where the city had rested was almost deserted, a barren and rugged expanse of rock so pocked with holes it looked like a granite sponge.

“All units! All units!” sounded over the comlink. “Code Priority One. Weapons release!”

From behind Tsuyama and to his right, a turret rotated, tracking, then fired, the laser pulse superheating dust and air in a dazzling streak of blue light accompanied by a thunderclap. A massive, wet chunk of one of the moving gourds spun through the air, but the thing kept coming.

“Fire,
Chuisan!”
Tsuyama yelled over the strider’s ICS. “Open fire!” He loosed a salvo of M-21 rockets, sending them slashing into the tangle in the perimeter breach on trails of fire. Sanada triggered the main laser an instant later, and in seconds the advancing wall of DalRiss constructs was masked by a churning cloud of smoke and steam.

Other parts of the fence were going down now, despite the barrage of laser fire and missiles from the base defenses. It was as though the entire alien city had suddenly decided to launch an unprovoked attack against the Imperials on ShraRish.

“Fire!” Tsuyama yelled, his cephlinked voice shrill with growing panic. “Fire!
Fire!…
”

Chapter 1

It was
Dai Nihon
that exploited Man’s first few, tentative steps into space from Earth’s cradle,
Dai Nihon
that built the first orbital factories and Lunar mines,
Dai Nihon
that developed the first Quantum Power Taps, subsequently making possible the miracle of entering the
Kamisama no Taiyo,
the Godsea that gave Man the stars.

How strange, then, that
Dai Ninon’s
children throughout the Shichiju grow restless, when Greater Japan remains the fountainhead of technological innovation. Or perhaps it is not so strange after all. Children often grow impatient with the wisdom of their elders and need to be reminded of their
on,
their moral and devotional obligations to parents and Emperor.

—
Man and the Stars: A History of Technology

Ieyasu Sutsumi

C.E.
2531

Falling through star-scattered night, the Confederation destroyer
Eagle
had already matched course with the two targets. White plasma tinged with violet glowed in the throats of her aft thrusters, then faded.
Eagle
would be within visual range of her prey within minutes.

Dev Cameron was linked into the destroyer’s tactical program. His body lay comatose within one of the ship’s command link modules, but through the metallic traceries of the cephlink, his awareness was centered within the virtual reality of
Eagle’s
combat direction center. In his mind’s eye, he stood with the ship’s senior bridge officers, as glowing paths traced themselves in the air above a 3-D projector.

Voices murmured at the edge of awareness, spills from other channels, reminders that he was part of a network of hundreds of people working the ship.
Eagle’s
AI would see that he heard those conversations he needed to hear. Printed data scrolled past his awareness as well, words and figures overlaying the edge of his vision describing range, approach vectors and velocity, and the design and weaponry of the two ships ahead. Most of the information was being relayed to
Eagle’s
CDC from a small fleet of remotes, meter-long probes directed by ViRcom-linked pilots aboard the destroyer, fanning out ahead of the ship, and now closing to within a few hundred kilometers of the targets.

His first guess had been correct. The Imperial ships were a freighter and an escort. Though details were tough to glean at this distance,
Eagle’s
AI estimated an eighty percent chance that the freighter was a Type IV, grossing at least forty-five thousand tons, with an even higher probability that the escort was a Chitose-class corvette. They were inbound toward New America; it had been their bad luck to emerge from K-T space within half a million kilometers of where
Eagle
had been lurking, well beyond the immediate response radius of any of the Imperial ships orbiting the planet.

“They’ve detected us, Captain,” Lieutenant Commander Kelly Grier reported. She was
Eagle’s
bridge scan officer and was receiving data feeds from twenty tech stations and several remotes. “The corvette has gone end-for-end and is decelerating, putting itself between us and the freighter.”

“I see it,” Dev replied, watching the symbols shift on the 3-D display. “He’s going to fight. Weapons!”

“Ready to fire,” Lieutenant Commander Tomid Messier,
Eagle’s
senior weapons officer, snapped back. “In missile range in thirty seconds.”

“I want a single Starhawk,” Dev told him. “Canister warhead, and I want a cripple, not a kill. Put your best operator on it.”

“I’ll take the bird in myself, Skipper.”

“Grier? How long do we have to make a clean getaway?”

Dev glimpsed a flicker of alternate projected courses and situations in front of the sensor officer’s slender, blond-headed analogue, sensed rather than heard the rustle of parallel computations through her linkage. “Twenty-eight minutes, Captain. If we’re not aboard by then, there are at least two Impie destroyers at New America that would be able to intercept us on the way out, no matter what evasive action we took.”

“Not very long. We’re going to have to hustle, people. Engineering!”

“Yes, sir!”

“Acceleration to four Gs.”

“Four Gs, aye, aye, Captain.”

“That’ll make docking a problem,”
Eagle’s
executive officer observed. Her name was Lisa Canady, and she was a full commander only recently transferred to
Eagle
from the Confederation Yards at Rainbow. “We’re going to have a hell of a time matching velocities. Especially with the corvette.”

“We’ll lose the corvette if we have to,” Dev told her. “I want that freighter.”

“We have a long-range visual from Remote Five,” Lieutenant Grier reported. “Confirm the escort is Chitose-class, INS
Teshio.
And I’m picking up radar originating from New America. They’ll see us in another thirty seconds.”

That was how long it would take those radar signals—or the call for help that was certainly flashing toward the planet from both targets—to reach New America across nine million kilometers.

Downloading a command code from his personal RAM, Dev opened a new window-world in his linked awareness. He was still in
Eagle’s
CDC but looking into night blackness strewn with stars. Brightest was the primary, 26 Draconis A, a yellow sun slightly brighter and hotter than Sol; Draco B, a red dwarf, glowed like a sullen ember in the distance, while the dim and distant third member of the trinary system was invisible from this angle. Centered in the window, the fourth planet in A’s five-world retinue was a gleaming spark with a tiny companion: New America and its moon, Columbia. The Imperial ships were invisible at this distance, of course, marked on the display by a blinking red square encompassing both world and moon and indicating unidentified but presumed hostile fleet elements.

Almost directly between New America and the
Eagle,
the images of the two ships the rebels were pursuing had been captured by one of the remote, high-speed probes launched minutes ago. They appeared toy-sized, their edges white-lit in the glare of 26 Draco A. Course and speed data glowing alongside each showed that the corvette was indeed slowing, blocking
Eagle’s
approach while allowing its larger consort to continue falling toward the planet.

A suicide’s choice. A Chitose corvette massed nine hundred tons to
Eagle’s
eighty-four thousand. One salvo from
Eagle’s
forward laser batteries would leave the escort a riddled, airless hulk.

“We should smash the goking bastards.”

Dev wasn’t sure who’d muttered those words over the command link. He could have checked with
Eagle’s
AI, but it didn’t really matter. “Steady there,” he said. “Our target is the freighter. If we stop to play with that corvette, we’ll be doing exactly what they want.”

Downloading another command, Dev returned to the CDC. He could feel the tension building among the officers in the linkage, in the clipped exchanges, in the lack of the usual bridgelink banter. That was to be expected. Many of the officers and crew members aboard
Eagle,
including both Grier and Messier, were New Americans. It must be especially hard for them, Dev thought, to be operating within sight of their homeworld, unable to do a thing about the Imperial battlefleet holding it captive.

Well, the war had been hard on everyone, and they all knew things were going to get worse before they got better. It was a bitterly unbalanced struggle. The
Shichiju
—“The Seventy,” a term that had been out of date for some time, now—numbered seventy-eight populated worlds in the seventy-two star systems governed by the Terran Hegemony, the nominal government which in turn was anchored in place by the military might of
Dai Nihon,
the empire of Greater Japan. So far, just eleven of those worlds had declared their independence by signing the Confederation’s Declaration of Reason, and of those, two of the most important, Eridu and New America, had promptly been occupied by Imperial forces.

Until just a few months ago, New America had been the capital of the rebel Confederation, the spiritual rallying point for all of the systems that had so far broken with Hegemony and Empire. Almost fifty light years from Sol, New America was one of the richest of the Shichiju’s worlds, with no fewer than three separate colonies—North American, Cantonese, and Ukrainian—and one of the precious few planets discovered so far with a native ecology where men could live without having to terraform climate and atmosphere to human specifications.

The Empire’s decision to invade New America had been a major escalation in what until that point had been little more than sparring, a contest of skirmishes, words, demands, and minor armed incidents testing willpower and resolve rather than an outright war. The invasion had marked a turning point in the war, one bearing the promise that the purchase price of Confederation independence would not be cheap.

A second escalation had occurred at the world called Herakles, a few months later. The Confederation government, fleeing the debacle at New America, had taken refuge in a system abandoned by man decades earlier. At least part of the reason for that decision had been the presence of the Xenophobe; Dev had managed to make contact with the strange being, had enlisted its aid in the war against the Empire. Almost certainly, the Naga was incapable of comprehending such human concepts as “allies” or “war,” but with the Naga joined directly with Dev’s nervous system, the two of them had created… something new, something smarter and more powerful and far more dangerous than man or Naga alone.

That symbiosis—Dev still had trouble confronting the memory of that time—had ended with the obliteration of a major Imperial battlefleet. Just three enemy ships had escaped to spread the news of a terrible and incomprehensible weapon in the rebel arsenal on Herakles. Early hopes that the Battle of Herakles might end the fighting and establish independence for the Confederation worlds had been dashed, however, when the Imperial Staff had announced that there could be no dialogue, no peace, and no quarter for traitors. The war was going to continue for a long time, with Naga participation or without.

So far as New America was concerned, the Confederation would be returning there one day; the world, its resources, its people were too valuable to the Rebellion to simply abandon them to the Hegemony and its Imperial masters. That day was likely to be awhile in coming, however. The infant Confederation Navy mustered a fraction of the number of ships on the Imperial lists, and
Eagle
—formerly the Imperial destroyer
Tokitukaze
—was the rebels’ single most powerful warship, dwarfed in size and firepower by the Empire’s cruisers and kilometer-long dragonships. In the meantime, the Confederation would have to limit itself to hit-and-run strikes against lightly defended Hegemony outposts.

And commerce raiding. The glowing starpoints on the 3-D navigational graphic flashed out, replaced by a combat display, gleaming colored lights floating against blackness.
Eagle’s
weapons systems showed full readiness.

“Identity of corvette
Teshio
confirmed,”
Eagle’s
communications officer reported. “They’re hailing, demanding identity codes.”

“No reply,” Dev said. “They know we’re up to no good.”

“We’re in range, Captain,” Messier reported. “Starhawk Three is powered up and ready to accept link.”

“And target is launching,” Grier added. “Two… no, make that four missiles. Definitely remote-piloted, probable Starhawk class.”

New points of light appeared on the combat display. The pace of data flow, of urgent, low-voiced exchanges between members of the bridge crew and with the enlisted personnel manning stations throughout the ship increased. It was often said, Dev remembered, that life in the military during wartime consisted mostly of sheer boredom, punctuated by rare, brief interludes of stark terror.

The terror had begun. He knew his heart rate was up, that adrenaline was flowing through his sleeping body, though he couldn’t sense the changes through his analogue.

“Countermissile defenses standing by. Tracking.”

“Scans show nuclear warheads in those missiles, probable one-to-three-kiloton range. They’re arming.’’

Nukes. For centuries,
Dai Nihon
had maintained a monopoly on all nuclear weapons, part of the control they wielded over Earth’s Hegemony. That had been changing lately, as the rebellious colonies scrambled to develop nuclear weapons of their own, but few warheads were available yet.
Eagle
possessed only conventional warheads in her magazines.