Symbionts (44 page)

He’d certainly not expected an Alyan ship to appear
here,
however, and the incident had left him uneasy. Assuming the vessel to be hostile, he’d first ordered
Karyu
and several of her escorts to break orbit and close with the intruder; when it had ignored his repeated lasercom demands for identification and communication, he’d ordered
Karyu’s
missile batteries to fire.

For three days, now, he’d wondered if he’d done the right thing, wondered if, possibly, there’d been some kind of breakdown in communications that had led to some dreadful mistake. For a time, he’d half expected the stranger to appear again, this time with a fleet behind it, and weapons impossible even to imagine. Against that possibility, he’d loosed more teleoperated probes, and he’d put all of
Otori
Squadron on special alert, extending patrols of frigates and corvettes farther out from Mu Herculis A and ordering meticulous and continuous scanning sweeps of all surrounding space with radar, ladar, and infrared searches.

As the hours had passed, however, Miyagi had begun to allow himself to relax. The DalRiss vessel, if that was what it had been, had been in sight for only a few minutes, and it had vanished within seconds of
Karyu’s
missile launch. Possibly, he reasoned, he’d glimpsed a refugee from Alya; he’d heard rumors, passed on by one of his destroyer captains newly arrived from Earth, that an Imperial fleet was on its way to the Theta Serpentis suns to deal with the DalRiss for their unprovoked attack on the Imperial Mission. The stranger might have been fleeing that battle… though Miyagi could not understand why they’d chosen
this
system as a refuge. True, they were aliens, and like all
gaijin
they did not reason in logical ways. Still…

After nearly three full days, however, Miyagi was exhausted. He’d remained linked in the tacnet for nearly that entire time, relying on the link module hardware to feed him and care for his body’s physical needs, on brief, private periods of alpha stimulation to keep him refreshed and alert.

But the strain was beginning to tell. He’d told himself that he was serving no cause, fulfilling no duty with the exhausting mental stress of continual linkage. The campaign on Herakles was going well, the victory over the Confederation fleet had been as complete as any in history. Finally, he’d broken the link in order to get a real meal and some real sleep.

He’d gone to bed, as was his habit, in a small compartment in
Karyu’s
zero-gravity habitat, strapped to a bulkhead with Velcro fasteners to keep him from drifting with the currents from me air circulation ducts. Fifty-one minutes after strapping himself in, by the time function in his cephlink, his aide was shaking him awake.
“Chujosama!Chujosama!”
The man’s normally impassive face was creased with worry. “Please, sir, wake up!”

“Eh? I’m awake. I’m awake. What is it,
Fukkansan?”

“The Alyan strangers, sir. They’re back!”

“Strangers… what?When?”

“Minutes ago,
Chujosama.
But they are close! Less than ten thousand kilometers!”

“Chikusho!”
He groped for the straps, tugging them free. His aide began helping him with his uniform. “Is it just the one again?”

“I am sorry to say, no,
Chujosama.
We have counted at least ten Alyan craft, ranging in size from approximately that of a large destroyer, to one vessel that is at least twice the size of
Karyu.”

Baka-ni suruna-yo!”
Miyagi snapped. “Don’t think I’m stupid!”

“Sir!” Somehow, the aide managed an abject bow in zero gravity, no mean feat when he was adrift in the middle of the room. “Please, sir! It is the complete truth!”

“We will see.”

And Miyagi saw, moments later, as he jacked into
Karyu’s
tactical simulation. The Alyan craft—damn it, they
had
to be Alyans, for nothing of human manufacture looked remotely like those bizarre, bump-surfaced shapes with their stubby arms and hulls like rusted iron—the Alyans were grouped in a ragged, spherical shape with their largest vessel hanging toward the rear, and they were accelerating toward the
Otori
flagship at an estimated four gravities. There was no sign of plasma flare, no ion trails, not even a neutrino flux to give clues to the weird-looking vessels’ power plants. There was an unusual magnetic flux encasing each ship, a pulsing, rippling flow of power that might be propulsion, or it might be some kind of weapon.

Seconds after he linked into the net, eight more Alyan ships appeared… or were they? The first ten were starfish shapes, differing one from another in numbers of arms and in overall size, but all essentially of the same design. These newcomers were different, lumpy, organic shapes that looked more like dark-skinned escapees from some giant’s vegetable garden than starfaring vessels. And these ships were spilling neutrinos… not to mention radar and ladar signatures that identified them as human-built and human-manned ships.

“Battle stations,” Miyagi said softly. The order was picked up by the tactical net and broadcast throughout all the ships of the Imperial battlefleet, though most of the warships were already on full alert.
“Shosho
Kima? Are you on the net?”

“Hai, Chujosan!”

“Bring all weapons to full power. This looks like an attack formation of some kind.”

“I agree,
Chujosan.
All weapons are at full power and standing by. We are tracking the targets.”

“Excellent. Has there been any attempt at communication?”

“We have been querying them for identification since they appeared. There has been no reply.”

“Ah.” Miyagi watched the approaching vessels, suddenly uncertain. The hell of a battlefleet command was that there was no higher authority to appeal to… save for that of the Imperial Staff Command back at Earth. A wrong guess, a wrong move, a misstep in diplomacy or a stupid underestimation of a military foe, and at best his naval career would be ruined. At worst, well, even the modern and enlightened
Dai Nihon
still expected those of its servants bearing the greatest responsibilities to apologize for their mistakes with their lives. It was, Miyagi had always thought, an excellent system, one that wonderfully focused an officer’s attention on his duty.

The enemy ships were well within range and still approaching. “Stand by to fire.”

“Hai, Chujosan!”

Miyagi sensed the awesome power of the
Karyu
gathering about him.…

The Alyans approached the core of the Imperial battle group in two formations. In the lead were ten Alyan “warships,” the starfish shapes, including the enormous bulk of
Daghar.
Trailing by a thousand kilometers came eight DalRiss transports, each carrying a Confederation vessel in its bowels.

The Imperials, Dev thought with a barely suppressed quiver of anticipation, must be beside themselves by now. The incoming ships would be unlike anything the Imperials had ever tracked; the transports would look bizarrely alien, yet their electronic signatures would include spills from the human-built ships in their bellies, neutrinos from powered-up fusion plants, and the questing fingers of weapons radars and laser ranging devices peeking through the Alyan ships’ flexible and immensely adaptable hulls.

Linked into the Naga that was
Daghar’s
brain and nerves and senses, Dev felt the prick and tingle of Imperial track and search radar, and he knew that gigawatts of raw energy were about to be released. He’d been counting seconds, steadily and automatically, since the first DalRiss ships had broken into fourspace. He was estimating four minutes from the time the Alyan fleet was first sighted to their decision to open fire.

At two hundred seconds, some part of his hyperawareness overrode his intent to count out another forty. The Imperial commander must be steeling himself
now
to give the order to fire.

“Group Two!” he called out over his link. “Leapfrog,
now!”

During the planning sessions back at ShraRish, Dev never had been able to explain to the DalRiss what leapfrog was, but the concept was clear enough, in any case. The trailing squadron vanished from normal space…

… and reappeared instantly ten thousand kilometers closer to their goal, inside the core of the Imperial battlefleet and less than half a thousand kilometers from the
Karyu
herself.

“Group One! Shift
now!”

The ten starfish winked out, dropping back into fourspace well behind Group Two, and angling in toward the planet, a feint designed to draw the fire of other Imperial ships.
Karyu
launched a salvo of missiles in the same heartbeat, followed, two beats later, by the flicker of lasers and accelerated particle beams.

Dev felt the familiar drumbeat of excitement thundering in his linkage, the godlike thrill of destiny and power and martial glory. “Niner-niner!” he cried over the radio linkage, a code phrase meaning the call was for all spacecraft. “This is Sword.
Commence fire!”

“Targeting systems.”

“Go.”

“Life-support.”

“And go.”

“Communications. Switch off ship ICS. Going to squadron tactical.”

“Switching to squadron taccom, and testing: alfa, bravo, charlie…”

“Reading you on taccom, Three-five. Comtest is go.”

Van’s mind wandered as Commander Cole went on to check the comm circuits of the rest of the squadron’s warflyers. Fighter pilots had a certain reputation, one reputedly going back centuries to the very first men to risk their lives in fragile, aerial combat machines, a reputation for being hard-living, hard-loving, hard-fighting bundles of testosterone and machismo. More often man not, the female members of the squadron came across as harder than the males, as though they had to work harder to prove that they were part of the fighter pilot fraternity.

Still, that image had always been more for public consumption than a reality shared among the pilots themselves. A good pilot was part of an intricate and smooth-running machine, an intimate part of a team and not the lone wolf of popular ViRdrama. In many ways, he was more engineer than warrior, and jacking fighter or warflyer in combat more often than not required ice-cold focus and concentration, not fire-and-blood bravado.

Sublieutenant Vandis had nonetheless done his best to live up to the image, a responsibility always encouraged by the other members of his squadron, men and women alike, whether they were drinking with yujies in a public bar, or sharing there-I-was war stories with fellow pilots. It had been a long, long time, though, since he’d mingled in what the fraternity called “the real world,” so long that Vandis was beginning to think there was no world but the tight, close camaraderie of the junior officers’ mess and the squadron ready room.

Kuso,
the last time he’d been in a dirtside bar had been back on New America, just before the Impie invasion, hell, almost a year ago, now. He and Mario had jacked the tails of those three militia leggers. The last time he’d had real sex, the sweating, dirty, skin-on-skin kind with a willing stranger, instead of the canned fantasies of ViRsex… yeah, the same night as the bar episode. Memories of that sweet little
ningyo
could still trigger erotic dreams.

For nearly an entire year, then, he’d been living aboard the
Zed,
enclosed by gray walls, rarely seeing anyone but shipboard technicians and maintenance personnel, his yujies in Gold Squadron, and the other pilots of 1st Wing. He’d recjacked a lot, of course, including some fun and enthusiastic jackin’Jill three-ways with Lynn Kosta and Carey Graham, Gold Squadron’s two female pilots, but Van had always preferred the real thing to electronic feeds, and gok the jackers who claimed you couldn’t tell the difference.

He was sick of shipboard life. He wanted to walk dirt again… civilized dirt, not a vacant desert like Herakles or an alien jumble of surrealist art and jack-feed hallucinations like ShraRish.

Van recognized that at least part of the frustration was this endless waiting in the dark, figurative and real, waiting for the order to launch. He was used to watching the battle unfold in his tac feed; even if he was a helpless spectator, at least he knew what the hell was going on!

But
Tarazed
had been engulfed hours ago by one of those monster DalRiss transports. Since there were no electronic feeds from the Alyan ship to its cargo, the
Zed
was riding along in the darkness too, unable to present a tactical feed to the warflyers resting in the converted tanker’s bays and launch tubes. The only word Van had about the outside universe were periodic verbal updates by either Commander Cole or the Wing CO, Captain Bailey.

“Right, everybody,” Cole’s voice said. “Twelve for twelve, checked and ready. Gold Eagle set for launch.” The Skipper sounded taut and hard, maybe a bit worried. Well, who the hell in their right mind wouldn’t be worried right now? He tried to picture Gold Eagle’s principal target, the Ryu-carrier, stretching across the heavens like a mobile fortress, then gave it up. He was nervous enough without deliberately conjuring up nightmares.

“Wish they’d get a move on out there,” Sublieutenant Carey Graham said, her voice as sharp-edged as a monofilament blade.

“Watch,” Cal Schmidt said with a chuckle. “They’ll wait until things are in a goking mess, then send us in to—”

“Damp it down, Gold!” Cole’s voice snapped. “Fleet feed coming through!”

“Warflyer wing! This is Sword!”

The new voice came in through his cephlink by way of
Van’sGuard’s
new DalRiss radio circuit. Van recognized the voice—none other than Deadly Dev himself.

“Your transport has just made a tactical shift and is less than eight hundred kilometers from your primary target. The larger ships will move in first and try to hammer down the Imperials’ PDLs and close defenses. I’ll give you the word to launch in about thirty more seconds.”