Symbionts (20 page)

“Looks like we’re in luck,” Dev told Katya as they watched the constellation of drive flares dwindling into the distance. “For a change we actually outnumber and out-mass the bad guys, and that’s with three of our ships still missing.”

“For how long?” Katya wondered. “Their relief fleet can’t be very far behind us, can it?”

They’d discussed that aspect of the problem at considerable length before leaving Herakles. No matter how weak or strong the enemy’s strength in the Alyan system, it was a sure bet that the Imperials would be sending reinforcements, and soon. By acting immediately, as soon as they’d heard about the DalRiss attack on the Imperial base, Farstar had bought itself a small bit of time… but only as much as the Imperial Staff Command allowed them as it considered the problem at ShraRish. Imperial military reactions tended to be a long time in coming, slowed by their sheer size and ponderousness. CONMILCOM felt that this time the Imperials would move with particular deliberation, for they would be reluctant to get involved in a full-scale war with the enigmatic DalRiss, especially when the DalRiss motives for their original attack were still unclear.

Still,
some
response must already be en route from Sol, one powerful enough to meet any threat—including that presented; by the Confederation force. CONMILCOM had ViRsimmed the possibilities endlessly and felt that the relief force would at the very least include four or more Amatukaze-class destroyers, like
Eagle,
and might very well include one of the big Ryu carriers, together with a suitable escort. Once a force that large and powerful dropped out of K-T space, the only course of action left open to the rebels would be headlong flight.

There was a moral dilemma inherent in the situation, one that had been nagging at Katya throughout the weeks since they’d left Herakles. If the DalRiss had attacked the Imperial forces on ShraRish, logically it could only be because they felt they were strong enough to throw the Imperials out and keep them out, no matter what they sent as reinforcements. The question was, however, whether the DalRiss had a realistic understanding of just how powerful the Imperial Navy actually was. They’d seen only those Imperial vessels that had come and gone in the Alyan system over the past three years, and no one knew how good their information on Hegemony and Imperial strengths might be, or how much of that information they might understand. Chances were, they understood humans about as well as humans understood them… which meant not very well at all.

Now the Confederation Expeditionary Force had arrived, hoping to establish a military alliance with the DalRiss, encouraging the Alyans to join in the fight against the Imperials.

And the moment a major Imperial flight entered fourspace near Alya, the rebels would be forced to flee or be destroyed.

The DalRiss, however, would have to stay and take whatever punishment the Empire decided to deliver against their worlds. The situation was damned near intolerable for Katya, who still chafed at Sinclair’s decision to abandon New America to the enemy. When Farstar had first been proposed, when Sinclair had first suggested that she might serve as liaison to the DalRiss, in fact, she’d thought alliance with the DalRiss might well be the one hope the Confederation had for survival.

Now, though, she wasn’t so sure. What good would alliance with the Alyans be if all it served to do was bring them under the Emperor’s guns too? Their biologically based combat technology had lost the fight against the Xenophobe on GhegnuRish and had been losing the one on ShraRish; a relatively brief campaign by the Imperial Expeditionary Force in 2541 had destroyed the ShraRish Xeno in short order, and the IEF would have taken on the one occupying the DalRiss homeworld as well had Dev not managed to establish contact with it. Clearly, human military technology was far tougher—faster, meaner, and lugging heavier firepower—than the equivalent DalRiss biotech.

How long could the DalRiss possibly hope to survive a full-scale war with the Empire?

“Damn it, Dev,” Katya said, her mental voice low. “The Confederation is going to carry the guilt of their destruction for a long time to come.”

“Sorry?” She could hear his puzzlement and knew he’d misunderstood her. “Kat, this is war.
Civil
war, and those are the bloodiest of all.”

“No, I mean the DalRiss. It’ll be our fault if the Imperials come back in and raze their whole planet. They won’t have a chance.”

“Well, I might point out that we’re here because
they
started shooting at the Imperials, so if they’re in a war now, it’s because they started it. That’s part of what we’re going to have to talk with them about, isn’t it?” He sounded casual, almost uncaring. “The DalRiss strike me as bright folks. Whatever their reasons for hitting the Impies, they must’ve been good ones.”

“Kuso,
Dev. How can you be so cold about it?”

“Not cold at all. Just practical. Besides, we’re talking about an entire planetary population. If they do help us, it’ll be with… what? The secret of their magic space drive. Maybe some of their living warstriders if they really want an active part in this war, though I wouldn’t recommend putting one of those things up against a KY-1001 Katana. The Empire’ll take note, sure, and they might hit back, but they’re not going to destroy the whole DalRiss planet, any more than they’d destroy New America just to take out the few thousand people there who happen to be New Constitutionalist rebels. Hell, Katya, they couldn’t. They know Herakles is one hundred percent rebel, and the worst they might try would be saturation bombing from orbit with nukes. They can’t destroy an entire planet.”

“A saturation nuclear bombardment could render the place uninhabitable,” Katya pointed out, “and that’s the same thing. I damn sure wouldn’t put it past them, some of them, at any rate.”

“The
Kansei,”
Dev said. “Yeah. Some of them would at least give the idea serious thought. If it meant a quick, cheap end to the rebellion, well…”

The
Kansei no Otoko,
the self-styled “Men of Completion,” were a faction within the highest levels of the Imperial military and government. Confederation intelligence knew little about them, save that they were dedicated to cleansing the upper ranks of both the military and civilian Imperial governments of all
gaijin
influence. It was strongly suspected that the previous emperor, a man known for his desire to integrate Japanese and non-Japanese leadership at all levels throughout both the Hegemony and the Empire, had been assassinated by the Kansei faction. The new Tenrai Emperor—his
nengo,
or era-name, meant Heavenly Thunder—was a weakling propped up on his throne by Kansei officers.

“I don’t know about you,” Katya continued, “but I wouldn’t put anything past Munimori.”

She meant, of course,
Gensui
Yasuhiro Munimori, commander of the First Fleet and a senior admiral on the Imperial Military Staff. It was he who’d issued the notorious Edict of 2543, expelling all
gaijin
from senior line naval posts.

“Maybe not,” Dev agreed, somewhat grudgingly. “Still, even Munimori’s not crazy. Human-habitable planets are rare. That’s why we invest so much in terraforming the prebiotics. Even he won’t turn a world like Herakles into a radioactive desert just for the thrill of killing a few thousand rebels, right? And he wouldn’t risk genocide because a few DalRiss decided to side with us.
If
they side with us. We still don’t know that they will, or can.”

“I wish,” Katya said quietly, “that I could feel as sure of that as you are.”

It was the nature of space combat that events either dragged across vast distances, or passed so swiftly that they were beyond the reach of purely human intervention. Even accelerating at 50 Gs, it would take the teleoperated drones over eighteen minutes to cross six hundred thousand kilometers.

Rather than wait impatiently in the primary tactical linkage, Dev chose instead to enter the computer-generated alternate reality being grown from the data transmitted back from the probes and correlated through
Eagle’s
AI. When he linked with the new sim, the display field was black emptiness occupied solely by the bare globe of ShraRish, so far an empty, translucent sphere.

“Commodore Cameron,” the simulation’s director said in greeting. Commander Paul Duryea was
Eagle’s
senior sensor imaging specialist. “It’s too early to tell much as yet.”

“That’s okay, Commander,” Dev replied. “I want to be here as it starts coming in.”

“Help yourself, then. There won’t be much to look at until we’re considerably closer.”

A close inspection of the blank globe revealed the faint outlines of known planetary landmarks. ShraRish had no oceans or separate continents; instead, its single, globe-spanning land mass was broken here and there by large, landlocked seas, enormous bodies of water first mapped by the Imperial Expeditionary Force three years before. Still, Dev was unwilling to rely too heavily on data about the world that had come through Imperial sources. More than once, he’d seen clear evidence of Imperial attempts to alter or suppress information about the Alyan systems.

The local atmosphere, for instance. There was no denying the fact that the ShraRish atmosphere was poisonous to humans, partly because the CO
₂
level of about five hundredths of one percent was dangerously high, partly because the partial pressure of oxygen was far too low. There were also significant levels of sulfuric acid on the planet, both as a vapor in the air and as a liquid component of both rain and the seas.

Frequently in the last three years, however, information about the Alyan worlds disseminated by the Imperials had made their surface environments seem far worse than they were. The atmosphere favored by the DalRiss was described as being like that of Venus, albeit without the crushing pressures and molten metal temperatures; during one of Dev’s first ViRsimulations of a DalRiss environment, in fact, the atmospheric CO
₂
had been described to him as “over eighty-three percent,” which was actually the percentage of
nitrogen
in the planet’s air. As for the sulfuric acid, it was usually described as “dangerously corrosive.” That was true enough perhaps for unprotected metal or fabricated building materials left to face the elements for weeks at a time, and
prolonged
exposure by unprotected human skin was certainly not advised… but the truth of the matter was that humans could survive on the surface of either Shra- or GhegnuRish wearing nothing more than ordinary clothing, goggles to protect their eyes from the acid in the air and the ultraviolet in the sunlight, and a breathing mask to concentrate the oxygen to breathable levels and filter out about half of the CO
₂
.

Dev knew; he’d
been
there, as had Katya and Brenda Ortiz and quite a few of the other scientists, troops, and shipjackers with Farstar. It was damned hot on the surface, uncomfortably so, but he’d needed to have one arm bare at least to accept a translator cornel; and during his final confrontation with the Naga beneath the surface of GhegnuRish, he’d actually left the environmentally controlled safety of his warstrider in order to be able to touch the alien creature directly, wearing nothing more than a shipsuit and a mask.

He was pretty sure that the data was being deliberately manipulated by the Imperial and Hegemony authorities to make communication with the DalRiss seem even more difficult and dangerous than it actually was. That was one reason why he’d insisted on such a large complement of teleoperated scouts. He wanted to enter the Alyan system with the assumption that he knew nothing, taking nothing for granted, and build up a data base independent of anything that had reached the Confederation by way of Imperial data bases, simulations, or scientists.

He was beginning to suspect that the most devastating weapon either side could wield in war was not thermonuclear warheads or kilometer-long dragonships or new and more powerful warstriders. No, the key weapon in any war was
information,
and Dev intended to gather as much of the precious commodity as he could before the shifting tactical situation forced him into combat.

Time passed, and the RD-40 scouts closed the dwindling gap between themselves and the alien world, fanning out from a straight-line course to make their final approach from several directions. Halfway to the target they separated into two groups, one of which continued accelerating all the way while the other flipped end over end and began coasting, ready to decelerate at the same rate. After pushing 50 Gs for over eighteen minutes, the first group was hurtling in at nearly six hundred kilometers per second, flashing through and past the Imperial squadron so quickly that only weapons directed by high-speed machines could have any chance of hitting them.

Even at that speed, however, the probes’ AI-directed sensors gathered enormous volumes of data in flickering instants of time, relaying it all back down the lasercom links to the Confederation ships. Soon, the Imperial vessels were known in enough detail to assign them names from
Eagle’s
warbook. The two Yari-class destroyers were the
Asagiri
and the
Naginata;
the frigates were
Hayate
and
Reppu,
both of the big, twenty-four-thousand-ton Arashi-class. The two smallest were twelve-hundred-ton Tidori-class corvettes,
Sagi
and
Hatukari.

Rippling flashes marked missile launches from the Imperial warships. By absorbing all light and radar energies that struck their nano-camouflaged hulls, the probes were nearly invisible both optically and to radar and ladar detectors. Such invisibility was never purchased without a price, however. Energy absorbed had to be balanced by energy given off; the remote probes were fairly bright infrared targets, and the plasma trails from their drives were easily tracked when the craft were under full thrust.