by Ian Douglas
—The Rise of Technic Man
Fujiwara Naramoro
C.E. 2535
Not even godlike powers, evidently, could ensure success in battle where chance and coincidence and the randomness of chaos ruled supreme. As Dev had been shutting down the Imperial warstriders one by one, Donryu and two of her consorts at synchorbit had opened fire with their primary laser batteries. The flash and its accompanying thunderclap had stunned Dev momentarily, leaving him blind and dazed. As vision returned, he could see that the ridge where the ten rebel warstriders had stopped to make their stand had been gashed open and burned, the rebel striders scattered about in small and broken heaps.
Though kilometers away, he could enhance his vision, his brain filling in details lost to distance. Surviving striderjacks were climbing out of their disabled machines, as Imperial troops swept in to disarm them and take them captive. Most of the Imperial Tachis had moved off the ridge and were advancing again toward the fleeing rebel convoy.
Kuso! He could continue disabling the Tachis, but the Imperial ships were still parked in orbit thirty-two thousand kilometers overhead . . . and on the ridge, the marines had moved in and were stripping and searching the prisoners. Damn it, Katya could be one of those prisoners down there, and he could do nothing, nothing!
He couldn't touch the marines. Helpless, he watched, struggling to make his newly creative and intuitive brain come up with something. Perhaps . . .
The only ploy he could think of now was to hit the ships in orbit. Could he disable a starship the same way he'd knocked out the Imperial assault striders? It ought to be possible, if he could find a communications frequency and patch himself in. Vast power remained in reserve within the body of the Naga, which filled much of the generator mountain beneath his feet now, and extended far off beneath the crust and around the curve of the planet.
He reached out . . . searching for linkage with one of the Imperial vessels. . . .
Aboard Mogami, one of four Kako-class cruisers, computer systems began shutting down by themselves, one by one in rapid succession. The ship's AI began to describe what was happening . . . a virus program of some sort had insinuated itself into Mogami's link network by piggybacking its way aboard on a communications carrier channel . . . and then the AI switched itself off, an electronic suicide.
Taisa Hijiri Ushiba was just groping his way up out of the embrace of his linkage slot after being unceremoniously booted off the link network when a bridge alarm began to shrill.
"Taisasan!" His second-in-command was floundering in midair, panic distorting his features. "Taisasan! The power tap!"
"I hear it, damn it!"
But how to respond with the computers shut down? Cold sweat broke out on Ushiba's face, spinning away in tiny, weightless, silver spheres as he shook his head. The alarm was the cascade alert, an indicator that the singularities were being called into existence within the ship's power tap chambers.
If Mogami's computers were off-line, there was no way to tune the harmonic frequency of those spinning singularities. The micro black holes would go out of control. . . .
He had to reestablish control over the ship's primary power system. Thrusting himself back into the link couch, he brought his palm down on the interface. Possibly there was still a partial network. If he could access the right codes . . .
There! He was in! He sensed his chief engineering officer next to him within the virtual reality of the ship's network. In front of him, a computer graphic representing the otherworldly strangeness deep within the ship's power core glowed with ghostly light. Two dazzling pinpoints of stark and scintillating radiance circled one another so quickly that their image dissolved into a white ring of sparkling light. Energy, the heat and hard radiation of the core of a star was already starting to flood through the gap. . . .
"Can you scram the power tap, Engineer?"
"I'm trying, damn it, I'm trying! I don't even understand how it came—"
"WATCH OUT!"
Through his linkage, Ushiba saw the singularity pair going unstable. The image had been slowed somewhat to enable the human eye to perceive it, and therefore lagged behind reality. He never saw the final collapse, as one singularity evaporated in a blinding flash of raw energy.
The second micro black hole, slingshotted forward when its partner had vanished, tunneled through energy receptors and superconducting coils, through magnetic screens and plasma containment fields, through lead and iridium and polyceramic insulator shielding, a fast-moving, fiercely radiating pinpoint.
Traveling like a bullet, the singularity enthusiastically puckered the very shape of space around it as it plowed through electronic circuitry and bulkheads, air and human beings, steadily gaining mass as it devoured the heart of the Mogami. Hard radiation, gamma and X rays, flooded the inhabited portion of the ship as matter crowded down that hungry, molecule-sized gullet and vanished. It didn't have sufficient mass to swallow the entire ship, but between its radiation output and the gravitational tides wreaking havoc with her support struts and hull, the cruiser was doomed.
Mogami, her hull structure stressed far beyond her engineering specs, shrieked. . . .
"Chujosan!"
"I see it," Kawashima snapped back. "Order all ships to shut down communications instantly!"
"But—"
"Do it, then kill Donryu's communications! They're infecting our AI programming!"
"Hai, Chujosan!"
Mogami, a six-hundred-meter-long, black-hulled cigar of duralloy armor and advanced nanotechnics, was crumpling before his virtual eyes, victim of a terrible engineering failure. An instant later, the rogue singularity emerged near the bow, a dazzling point of light hurtling out of orbit and into space.
Then the microsingularity evaporated in a burst of gamma rays and ultraviolet and visible light, a silent, dazzling explosion that washed across the hulls of every ship in the squadron, starkly illuminating them as though in the glare of an exploding sun.
"They're getting at our computers through the communications links, somehow," Kawashima said, more to himself than to his bewildered staff officers. "Helm! Power up! Take us out of orbit!"
They had to put some distance between this new rebel weapon and the squadron.
"Chujosan!" Eto, his chief of staff, called. "You're leaving the rest of the squadron?"
"When they see us leaving orbit, they will follow," Kawashima replied coldly. "If they do not, they will die."
"And our people on the ground?" The commanding officer of Donryu's marine contingent was furious. "Chujo! You are abandoning them!"
"They'll have to look out for themselves," Kawashima said coldly. "Until we figure out a way to counter this . . . thing."
"Engineering! Give us full thrust!"
"Hai, Chujosan!"
Dev could no longer reach the Imperial warships in synchorbit. Mogami's destruction had left him triumphantly exultant at the length of his reach . . . and frustrated at having that reach cut short. The Nihonjin squadron commander had guessed too soon how Dev had been affecting his ship's computers and shut down all radio and laser-borne communication. True, he was now cut off from his forces on the ground, and his ships were cut off from one another, a mob rather than a fleet . . . but Dev had felt those ships right here, within the closing of his hand, to be crushed out of existence.
Reprogramming was too slow, and vulnerable to a simple closing of a physical circuit. There had to be another way . . . and fast! Fast! Turning his enhanced gaze skyward, he could see Donryu already accelerating out of orbit, big, slow and clumsy, balanced on a silent flare of star-hot plasma.
Think! If you've suddenly grown so creative . . . think!
Momentarily, he turned his gaze inward. The vast bulk of the Naga was spilling from the mountain like cold, black lava, emerging at last from the secret privacy of its hidden caverns. It drank in the sunlight. Crude, newly shaped eyeballs rippled and swelled and opened along its surface, surveying surroundings cold and alien.
*I/we see . . .
**You/we can generate powerful magnetic fields.
*Yes. For movement, for . . .
**. . . navigation, for . . .
*. . . for launching the Will-be-Selves into . . .
**. . . the Void, yes. That is what we will do.
*The Will-be-Selves are not . . .
**. . . ready, of course. I have other missiles.
*What?
**These. . . .
*Rock . . .
Kawashima turned his full attention to the virtual image of the planet, hanging now like a great blue-and-gold sphere astern of Donryu's plasma flare. As that flare grew hotter, its radiation might well sweep across that part of the surface on the equator where rebels and Imperial Marines still struggled.
So long as the weapon that had reached out and crushed Mogami was destroyed as well, it didn't really matter. He would have liked to have taken Sinclair and the other Confederation leaders captive back to Earth, but the rebellion would be satisfactorily resolved if the leaders were killed, their fleet broken and scattered.
Something very strange was happening to the Heraklean surface.
The atmosphere just north of the Augean Peninsula had taken on a peculiar quality, glowing with an auroral light, sweeping around and around in a vortex of clouds that throbbed and pulsed with yellow lightnings.
Buddha and all my ancestors . . . what is happening there?
Lightning flared below, silent and vast. . . .
Katya was hurled to the ground by the shock wave, which left her gasping, her breath sucked from her lungs. God . . . what had she just seen? Shaking her head, trying to clear it, she looked up as the wind whipped and shrieked across her back.
Every man and woman on that ridgetop was down, Confederation prisoners and Imperial captors alike. There were no soldiers or prisoners any longer, only people struggling to survive in a wind gone mad. Beyond, kilometers beyond the ridgetop, the triangular shape of the atmosphere generator was wreathed in flickering, violet lightnings, as overhead, black clouds swirled about in a vast, dynamic whirlpool, the storm's eye centered above the apex of the pyramid.
The air crawled, against her skin, and her hair stood on end. The storm—such understatement in a word!—was causing frightful charges to build up in the atmosphere. Another flash of lightning, searingly brilliant, and she blinked hard against the green-and-purple afterimage. She must have imagined that; an instant before she'd gone blind, she'd thought she'd seen something peeling off the side of the mountain, then streaking skyward so fast that nothing could be seen but a bright, dazzlingly blue bolt of light.
Moments later, the sonic boom hit, but Katya never heard it.
She was already deaf as well as blind.
"Collision alert!"
"Point defense!"
"Too late!" Donryu's weapons officer sounded as though he was about to lose all control. "Damn it, too late!"
"Point defense on automatic!" Kawashima snapped. "Analysis! What was that thing?"
"A rock, Chujosan," Donryu's captain replied.
"Nonsense!" the Exec protested. "You don't throw rocks from the bottom of a gravity well!"
Kawashima was already replaying the image in his ViRsimulation, slowing down the speed by a factor of nearly a thousand. Gonichi Obayashi was right. It had been a rock . . . or, at least, a large mass of partly molten iron, scooped off the surface of the planet somehow and hurled into space. Its brief passage through atmosphere had heated it white-hot; its velocity as it passed Donryu, missing by a scant thousand kilometers, had been nearly one-tenth the speed of light.
Modern military literature contained many references to an old, old idea. In any war where one side controlled the high ground of space, bombardment of planet-bound forces became simplicity itself, so long as you didn't mind running the risk of altering the planet's climate. All you needed were a few small asteroids nudged into proper intercept orbits, or just a mass of nickel-iron large enough to survive the fiery plummet through atmosphere. A fair-sized asteroid had changed the face and the climate of Earth some sixty-five million years ago and driven the dinosaurs to extinction. Even a small asteroid dropped from orbit could annihilate a city.
But the advantage was supposed to be with the force in orbit. A planet was a damn poor place to throw rocks from . . . about like standing at the bottom of a deep, dry well and chucking rocks at somebody looking down from above. The chucker was more likely to get one of his own missiles back in his face than he was to hit the target.
But the rebels had somehow found a way of accelerating several tons of iron to a velocity of thirty-thousand kilometers per second. There'd been no time to dodge, no time to do anything but automatically record the missile's passage.
And, oh gods of my fathers, it's happening again! . . .
The lightnings gathered. The storm winds howled. Dev looked skyward, sharing his symbiont's newfound vision sense, relying on infrared and mass sense as the clouds swirled in.
**You/we almost had him that time. You/we . . .
*. . . must adjust my/our aiming point to allow for . . .
**. . . the target's movement, exactly.
*Ready.
**Now!
A one-ton chunk of iron and fabricrete, part of the support structure of the man-made mountain itself, tore free as powerful magnetic fields focused along its length and pulled, accelerating it in the wink of an eye. Lightning forked overhead; with a thunderclap of raw sound, the jagged missile vanished in a bar of blue-white radiance.
Kawashima saw the second launch but had no time to analyze it, no time even to shout warning. Nine-tenths of a second after it left the planet's surface, the block of half-molten slag slammed into the heavy cruiser Zintu, in orbit some five thousand kilometers away. Traveling at thirty-thousand kilometers per second, the projectile was moving too fast for the staid, low-velocity Newtonian mechanics of E=1/2mv2. The kinetic energy released on impact could only be calculated by the more familiar E=mc2, an equation that yielded roughly 1019 joules.
Such numbers are meaningless; say, rather, that one thousand twenty-megaton nuclear warheads were detonated simultaneously. Zintu did not crumple or glow or burn. She was simply gone . . . and in her place stood a small and short-lived sun. Briefly, the Imperial fleet was bathed in the actinic glare that touched and dissolved those vessels nearest the ill-fated cruiser.
"We must get away!" Kawashima screamed into the link. "Engage the power tap!"
"Chujosan! No!" The ship's captain was so shocked he didn't even realize the magnitude of his rudeness. "This close to the planet—"
"Do it! Now!"
"It will take a few moments to run the Noguchi Equations. . . ."
Lightnings flashed across the planet's surface. Half a million kilometers away, the destroyer Urakaze exploded in a sudden gout of light, silent as death.
The next missile struck Donryu, driving right up her stern long before equations could be run or the microsingularities of her K-T drive summoned into existence. The discharge of 1019 joules of kinetic energy transformed the kilometer-long ship into star-hot plasma in an instant. . . .
Again!
Lightning flashed, the missile seared into the zenith. In Dev's own, inner eye, he towered above the planet's surface, riding astride the winds, hurling lightnings, directing the storm against the scattering invaders in the sky.
And they were scattering, fleeing into the depths of space. Dev focused his newfound power and hurled another missile through the protesting, cloven sky. Thunder cracked and rumbled, as the first rains began lashing out of the clouds. In space, another ship, a light cruiser, vanished, the sheer, raw energy of impact vaporizing her. He selected another target and fired. The mountain trembled with the launch. There were six enemy ships left . . . now four. . . .
*Is this what you/we call war?
And then, the towering, larger-than-life feeling vanished. My God, what am I doing? Wh
at have I become?
**No. This is not war. It's slaughter. Useless slaughter.
The magnetic charge he'd been focusing for yet another shot into a fleeing Imperial warship dissipated, unneeded. In space far above Herakles's equator, a cruiser caught at the fringe of a blast spun brokenly end over end, its control systems smashed by a glancing blow. The four surviving warships, under full thrust now, fled, seeking safety in the empty depths of space.
No more rocks pursued them.
Chapter 28
Reality . . . virtual reality. The two echo one another, mutually complementary, mutually supporting. Yet in the end it must be reality that lays the greater claim to our souls, for it is in our link with the universe as it is that we find the heart-quickening joy-flavor-terror-wonder that tells us we truly live.
—Intellectus
Juan Delacruz
C.E. 2216
Katya rose from the ground as the mysterious storm wind died away. Sight and hearing had returned, though spots still danced before her eyes. Clouds still swirled across heaven, bringing with them sheets of rain, but the spectacular lightning storm was ended. She stood there, feeling the rain pelt her body and she felt . . . alive.
The rain lightened as quickly as it had come, dissolving to mist sprinkling the steaming ground. An Imperial trooper in full armor stumbled toward her, weaponless, his helmet gone, his eyes wide with terror. She stepped into him with a slashing elbow thrust, snapping his head back and sending him to the ground.
A laser pistol rested in the holster at his hip. Drawing the gun, she advanced across the torn and scorched ground. Two more Imperials approached, saw her, and ran the other way. She let them run. The enemy was harmless now, demoralized by what had happened.
What had happened? She still wasn't sure. Other soldiers gathered in small and fearfully huddled groups atop the ridge. Katya noticed that some groups included both Confederation and Imperial troops. The events of the past few moments appeared to have obliterated those differences that had once divided them.