Symbionts (47 page)

Dev could feel himself losing control.

The earlier exhilaration of controlling ten warships and eighty flyers and hundreds of warstriders like extensions of his own body had dwindled away, had vanished, at last, like a half-remembered dream as he’d watched the point defense lasers sweeping Katya’s Rangers out of the sky. It had been akin to a juggler with too many balls in the air losing control, watching the balls fall one by one. The relief he’d felt when a fighter’s cloudscreen had burst, sheltering the assault group the rest of the way, had been almost overwhelming… but it had brought with it an emotion-laden jolt:
I should have thought of that!
Somehow, he’d neglected to have them supplied for the warstrider assault on the Ryu-carrier. For
Katya’s
assault, and the oversight could have killed her and every striderjack in her team.

No, that wasn’t quite correct. He couldn’t forget about cloudscreens, not having used them in his spaceborne assault that had taken
Eagle
from her Japanese masters, and again in his raid at the Imperial shipyard at Athena. They were a basic part of modern space combat tactics, as elementary as radar, and he’d given orders to use them liberally during the approach, to screen the fighters.

What had failed, he feared, was his identification with the men and women occupying the ships and fighters swarming now around the embattled mountain that was
Karyu.
He’d been thinking of Katya’s striders, directed through the Naga link of his symbiosis, as a part of him, something that didn’t need protection.

Technomegalomania… a feeling that he was invulnerable within the aura of high-tech magic that linked him with organic minds and electronic systems distributed across a thousand kilometers of space. What he’d forgotten was that those motes drifting toward the
Karyu
were humans. People. Friends.

Damn!
He could have
killed
her!…

Elsewhere, the enemy escorts were moving in closer now, and the tide of battle appeared to be swinging around, turning against the Confederation assault force.
Rebel
was dead. So was the corvette
Daring,
savaged by repeated hits by lasers, particle beams, and rounds from the carrier’s hivel cannons.
Constellation
was adrift, her engines shut down, her maneuvering system shot to bits, though she continued to blaze away at
Karyu
and the other Imperial ships with as many batteries as she could bring to bear.
Eagle
was practically touching the Ryu-carrier, still fighting and moving but with half of her turrets out of action and a portion of her starboard flank glowing red-hot.

In bloody exchange, one Imperial frigate had been destroyed by a missile salvo launched by
Eagle,
and a light destroyer had been badly damaged. A light cruiser had tried to come up astern of the
Eagle,
but a sudden, unexpected barrage from
Constellation
loosed past the looming, black-and-gray barricade of
Karyu’s
flank had punctured the larger ship’s armor in a dozen places and left her powerless, at least for the moment.

And Dev watched over the carnage like a bloody-handed colossus, like a god of war, hurling his people into that sacrificial altar. Enemy fighters were swarming around the beleaguered
Karyu
now, hunting down the warstriders clinging to her back.

God… Katya!…

Had his own people become such… such faceless tools that he no longer thought of them as flesh and blood?…

A Soritaka fighter angled down out of a silver sky rapidly tattering away to star-filled black. Soundlessly, gouts of white fire erupted from the hull-metal ground twenty meters away. “Kurt!” Katya screamed over the strider’s ICS. “Nail him!”

“Tracking!”

The Warlord’s dorsal hivel cannon pivoted, and Katya sensed the vibration of its buzz saw fire…

… and then the fighter was past them, its wings aglow in sunlight. A missile detonated, and shrapnel slapped off the hull of Katya’s warstrider. A second fighter flashed in the sunlight… a third… a fourth.

“Damn it, they’re too fast!” Kurt yelled. “And there’s too many of them. Here comes another!…”

God,
Karyu’s
whole damned fighter wing must be out here, picking off the warstriders like vermin. Another silent explosion, and Hari Sebree was screaming wildly in her mind’s ear, a rasping wail of sheer agony… and then his stricken Scoutstrider ruptured in a glowing sphere of hot gas and fragments.

The gap in
Karyu’s
hull yawned a hundred meters ahead, a tunnel, a cavern yawning into the carrier’s vitals. Katya exerted her will through the Naga and streaked across broken and flame-streaked metal toward its shelter.

Shaken by the slaughter, shaken worse by his new insight into the bloody workings of his own mind, Dev extended his will, reaching out to the other DalRiss ships. He’d hoped to keep the other DalRiss vessels out of it. Maybe, he thought, he was still thinking like a human after all:
I can’t ask
that
of them.

And neither could he watch the slaughter of his people and do nothing.

In lightning pulses of thought, he relayed his last orders to the far-flung network of DalRiss ships. The DalRiss ships themselves were unarmed, but extrusions of the Naga fragment nested within each provided a weapon as devastating as any in the Confederation or Imperial arsenals. Drawing on the Dal-ships for power, the Nagas generated intense, tightly focused magnetic fields, using them to accelerate kilogram-sized chunks of themselves to speeds of hundreds of kilometers per second.

An Imperial light cruiser overhauling
Karyu
from astern took a chain of five hard-flung projectiles in rapid-fire succession, the impacts flaring white-hot in searing explosions of vaporized armor and escaping gases. The bow section of the cruiser shattered, the rest of the vessel’s length crumpling and folding and splitting wide open beneath that storm of high-velocity death. A corvette took three rounds and vanished in a dazzling nova-flash of light.

Daghar,
meanwhile, was moving again, gathering its energies for yet another short-range leap. Dev, his thoughts flickering from vessel to vessel, momentarily sought the bright node of familiar warmth that was Katya. Was she even still alive after descending through that wall of fire?

Yes!
He sensed her through her Naga’s touch. Briefly, he glimpsed her surroundings through her Warlord’s sensors… a storm of laser and particle beam fire as she led twenty or thirty of her warstriders toward a gaping, flame-shot maw opening in the side of the Imperial carrier.

But enemy fighters wheeled toward her. She wasn’t going to make it.…

“Niner-niner,” Dev said. “This is Changeling. Get ready, everybody! I’m going to provide a diversion with the
Daghar!
You’re all on your own! When you see your chance, take it and go!”

Goodbye, Katya.…

“Good luck, all of you.…”

Jump!…

*    *    *

So far, the entire battle had been taking place in Herakles’s orbit, with all of the vessels involved moving at more or less the same velocity and, except for the back-and-forth slashes of the highly maneuverable fighters, in more or less the same direction.

Now, though, the small suns tucked away within the cavernous overhangs of
Karyu’s
stern flashed on. Cones of charged particles, as hot as the wind sweeping from the face of the sun, blasted astern, driving the monster carrier’s ponderous bulk slowly forward, and when by chance they swept across
Daring’s
riddled and dying hulk, they turned armor incandescent and killed instantly every man and woman still alive aboard the crippled corvette.

Faster and faster.Under one gravity of acceleration, the carrier broke orbit, angling out and away from the storm-wracked planet. Those ships that could still move and maneuver followed, Imperial and Confederation both. The hulks—
Rebel
and
Daring
and the dead Imperial escorts—the cripples—
Constellation
and the powerless light cruiser—remained in Heraklean orbit, falling farther and farther behind.

“They’re moving!” Katya cried over the tacnet. “The bastards are moving out!” The side of the crater lunged toward her, slammed against her Warlord’s hull… and then suddenly there was gravity again as acceleration dragged at the strider’s frame. Katya’s orientation swung wildly for a moment, bringing with it a stab of vertigo. Down was
that
way, toward
Karyu’s
stern, and she was balanced on the lip of a giant crater, together with a handful of other warstriders as the carrier drove “upward” into space.

For a moment, she wondered if the Imperials were running, but immediately she discarded the idea. No, damn it, the Impies were winning…
winning!
By breaking orbit, they could lose the
Constellation,
which was continuing to snipe at the Imperial ships even though her main drive was down, and they might well shake some of the other ships that were snapping at her fire-torn flanks like hunting dogs. So far, the only thing keeping the Confederation ships alive was the fact the
Karyu
herself offered pretty good cover.

The enemy fighters had momentarily vanished from the sky, but they would be back, matching accelerations with the
Karyu
and continuing to blast the warstriders from their toeholds on her hull.

Then
Daghar
was back, two kilometers away and so huge it filled that half of the sky, making Katya feel as though she was clinging to the side of a cliff in a steep-sided valley, with canyon walls extending above and below her for as far as she could see.

She’d heard Dev’s transmission, but she’d been too busy at the moment for its meaning to seep through to awareness.
Kuso,
what was the damned fool doing now?…

At a range of two kilometers, Dev was throwing rocks again… kilogram-sized chunks of the Naga itself, accelerated to high speed and hurled across the narrow gap into
Karyu’s
stern section, just forward of the ravening blast of her flaring plasma drives.

In a ship as large and as massive as the
Karyu,
the vast majority of the ship’s hull is armor, or fuel tankage, or skyscraper-sized masses of circuits and power feeds, fusorpacks and sensor leads, all of them multiply redundant and with remarkably few vulnerable points. Ryu-class carriers were designed to
survive,
which meant there were no isolated places that could be precisely targeted for a kill… or simply taken out by a stray, lucky shot.

At point-blank range, though, Dev could target the general area directly ahead of
Karyu’s
huge drive Venturis. Somewhere beneath meter upon meter of duralloy and fabricrete plating would be the fusion chambers that fed those flaming suns astern… and the pumps that fed them with cryo-H, the lasers that flashed the hydrogen to fusion heat, the fusorpack-driven generators that powered the magnetic bottles and containment fields.

A stream of pellets slammed into
Karyu’s
dorsal hull with an impact felt throughout the ship like the blasting of a jack-hammer against a tin roof. Cubic meters of duralloy and steel vaporized; a crater yawned; inner circuitry and power feeds and tubing flashed and vanished like cotton in the blast of a blowtorch.

For a fraction of a second, the fusion reaction in
Karyu’s
drive chamber threatened to run wild. As magnetic grids failed, though, the ship’s AI recognized the danger of imminent containment field failure and scrammed the entire network. The ship’s driving suns winked out.…

“Fire control!” Admiral Miyagi screamed over the combat net. “Concentrate on that damned alien!” The ship’s drive had just cut out, and they were in free-fall once more. In another moment, that
gaijin
starfish would peel the mighty
Karyu
open from stem to bow.
“Kill it! Kill it!”

Karyu’s
remaining weapons swung about, tracking the Alyan monster. The fighters shifted aim too, loosing the first of a swarm of missiles against the huge DalRiss ship’s hull.

Zero-G again. Katya drifted above the gaping crater in
Karyu
’s side. The other warstriders that had been trapped with her and been freed when the carrier stopped accelerating were flashing past her and into the cavern. Others, those that had been caught by surprise when the Ryu began accelerating, were catching up now, flashing in from astern on hard-driven Naga mag fields. It was almost eerily peaceful in her small part of the battlefield. The fighters were gone, the PDL fire was concentrating on another target.

Katya was unable to move, however, unable to will the Warlord into the yawning darkness of that cave. Her full attention was focused on the
Daghar,
drifting now a little way astern of the
Karyu.
Imperial fire was tearing into the Alyan city-ship; its organic hide was not nearly so tough or so resilient as duralloy, or the other artificial, nano-layered materials of human technology. Missiles slammed home, each one burying deep beneath the ship-creature’s hide before detonating, each detonation flinging huge, fiercely radiating chunks of tissue into space.

It looked as though the entire, star-shaped mass was burning with a radiant, white-glaring flame.

“God!” she screamed. “God! No!
Dev!”

The DalRiss ship’s explosion lit the blackness of space like the utterly silent, eye-searing flash of a supernova.

Chapter 33

We pay a high price for being intelligent. Wisdom hurts.

—
Elektra

Euripides

413
B.C.E.

Once the Confederation warstriders smashed their way on board the Imperial Ryu-carrier, the outcome of the battle was a foregone conclusion. There were Imperial Marines aboard the
Karyu,
and several thousand surviving crewmen, despite heavy losses during the battle, but Imperial naval vessels did not routinely carry the sort of weapons, as shipboard sidearms, that would make any impression at all against a warstrider.