Symbionts

by William H. Keith

  “And Three-seven,” Mario’s voice chimed in. “Right behind you!”

  “Goddamn, that thing’s big!” Lynn Kosta said over the link. “I’m pulling right, looking for a soft spot.”

  “That’ll be like looking for a soft spot on a goking nickel-iron asteroid,” Lieutenant Alfred Horst, Three-six, added. “Skipper, we’re taking fire from up forward.”

  “Never mind the fire,” a new voice said, cutting in. “Come on, get in closer! Closer!”

  “Who the gok is that?”

  “This is Wing Six-zero-zero. Now cut the chatter and odie in close, or you’re all walking home!”

  Vandis felt an electric thrill surge through him. Wing 600 was the code identifier for the 1st Wing’s skipper, Captain Bailey. Bailey himself had launched with the squadron! “Damn, next thing you know, we’ll have Deadly Dev out here lending a hand! Three-two! This is Three-five! I’m sliding in under your ass!”

  His link-fed visual field was a complex dance of realtime objects and computer graphics, filled now by the growing bulk of the Imperial carrier. He cut acceleration, falling now toward the target as he readied his missiles for launch.

  Then the rapidly growing bulk of the Imperial carrier exploded with light, the rapid-fire twinkle of a thousand point defense batteries, and things started to go very badly wrong.

  Strangeness… and loneliness, »self« surrounded by hordes of not-Self, voices in the darkness of the Void of the Universe.…

  Katya tried to shut out the eldritch ripple of black thoughts peeping through her linkage with the Naga, tried instead to imagine what must be happening out beyond the blackness Surrounding Assassin’s Blade.

  This was, she thought, a strange way to go to war, three-hundred-odd warstriders sealed into the belly of a living starship, hidden away inside several million tons of alien, gene-tailored flesh. Dev, she knew, was elsewhere within the Daghar, waiting and watching for the proper moment to unleash the Naga-enhanced—she tried hard not to think the term Xenozombie—warstriders. The rest of the Confederation squadron, including the fighter wing aboard Tarazed, would be hitting the Karyu right now with everything they had, trying to batter down her defenses… and even more, to turn the Imperial battle staff’s full attention to the attack. At the right moment, Daghar would jump in close, releasing Katya and the two battalions of Naga-warstrider hybrids, then jump back to safety once more. Three hundred warstriders, able to maneuver and fight in space and linked together by Naga and cornel to each other and to Dev back aboard the Daghar, should prove to be a devastating and totally unexpected surprise for the Imperials.

  Warflyers had been used lots of times in actions against ships or orbital stations—at Eridu, in the capture of an Imperial destroyer later renamed Eagle, at an Imperial shipyard at Athena… but in all the history of warstrider warfare, there was no case that she had ever heard of of warstriders being used to board and storm an enemy ship.

  She felt… alone. Loneliness… »self« severed from the far vaster reserves and knowledge that was Self lost in the agony of budding that had given birth to this new and sharply limited awareness…

  But she wasn’t alone, not really. She was linked in with Ryan Green and Kurt Allen aboard Assassin’s Blade, and the Naga fragments provided instant communication along DalRiss-engineered organic radio circuits with every other warstrider in the group, but no one, no one out of all those hundreds of striderjacks was talking now. Oh, there’d been some chatter, some nervous banter and gallows humor earlier, before they’d made the jump from ShraRish to Herakles, mostly comments about being Xenozombies now.

  At this point, however, every person in the assault group was alone with his or her thoughts, feeling the strangeness… and the fear.

  Perhaps the strangest aspect for Katya was a change she’d discovered in herself. She was riding in darkness, literally in the bowels of the beast, unable to move, unable to see anything at all with her Warlord’s sensors blocked by the embrace of the creature-ship around her. Always before, darkness and the inability to move had all but shut her mind down as she battled the gibbering terror of her claustrophobia. It would have been wrong to say she felt nothing. The darkness was unpleasant, almost painful, and even worse was the nerve-grating helplessness, knowing that a battle was raging somewhere out there, beyond these walls of alien flesh, and she could do nothing to fight, to run, to hide, or even to know.

  But there was no panic… only a cold, sure knowledge that this was what she had to do. For the Rebellion. For Dev. For herself.

  She was pretty sure that the claustrophobia hadn’t kicked in because, for so long now, her attention had been so completely focused on Dev, on what was happening to him. This strange mix-and-match of human and nonhuman minds was the stuff of nightmares.

  Katya shuddered. It wasn’t her own Xenolink; she’d linked with them before without any particular problem. She could feel the Naga fragment embracing her Warlord’s legs and hip joints now and knew that she only had to open a particular communications circuit and its strangeness, sensed now as that rippling undercurrent of alien thought about Self and »self«, would fill her mind.

  No, it was Dev and what he’d become, remote and godlike in the embrace of Daghar’s Naga. She wondered how he was handling his role, coordinating the entire battle from the womblike embrace of Daghar’s human-conditioned inner sanctum.

  She listened to the murmuring silence, watching the enfolding darkness… and like the warriors of ten thousand years of battles, waited for the orders that would send her from the twilight world of waiting and into the blaze of combat.

  It was like being God.

  Dev could feel the power surging around him, through him, felt the challenge and the pounding bloodlust of single combat on a scale no mere human had ever known. He was completely unaware of the Daghar, save through a kinesthetic sense. He stood in space, motionless relative to the mountain-sized mass of the Karyu… and through the Xenolink the other ships, DalRiss and human as well, all felt like parts of that body, reaching out as he would stretch out his hand.

  Sometimes he spoke, his words link-transmitted to the appropriate ship or ships through the DalRiss communications net. In a sense, Dev’s mind was no longer wholly within the Daghar, but scattered across the entire combined fleet. He could feel the flutter of probing, targeting radar, feel the prick and stab and sting of beams and missiles, hear the steady, background roar of thousands of voices speaking, ordering, acknowledging, shouting, pleading, praying at once.

  He felt the waiting hundreds of warstriders still huddled inside Daghar’s belly. Soon…

  Sublieutenant Vandis tried to concentrate on targeting the monster ship that filled his forward view, but ships, warflyers, his friends were dying in the sky all around him. Lynn Kosta’s ship brushed the deadly, invisible flame of a particle beam, and then her warflyer, half molten and half crumpled hull and internal wiring spilling like a disembowelment, was spinning end over end over end as glowing fragments scattered across the night. “I’ve got lock!” Al Horst screamed. “Target lock! I’m—” and then he was gone too, his Warhawk vaporized by a laser pulse that chopped through the warflyer like a white-hot iron through plastic.

  Mario… where was Mario? “Three-seven! Three-seven! Where the gok are you, Ger?”

  “On your five and low.Jesus, Van, it’s a firestorm!”

  “Watch the PDLs and pull in tight! I’m targeting amidships, where there should be a cryo-H tank as big as the gokin’ Eagle. You with me?”

  “With you! Punch it!”

  Acceleration… and the two Warhawks leaped side by side toward the monster.

  “Van! I got targeting radar lock! Watch it! Watch—”

  Vandis flinched as white flame blossomed off his starboard side and aft. Gerard Mario’s Warhawk flared like a tiny sun, duralloy and steel and plastic and flesh and blood all boiling away in a puff of star-hot vapor.

  Oh, kuso, kuso!…

  No time. Karyu was a mountain… a worl
d looming ahead and below. A target… he needed a target… that crater! Vandis put his Warhawk into a slow spin, the movement crafted to keep tracking as the hurtling warflyer streaked across the carrier’s hull at a range of less than five hundred meters. The warflyer’s AI gave him the precise tick when range, speed, and vector all were perfect; he downloaded the command code and the Warhawk fired, sending two auto-linked Starhawk missiles streaking into the glowing ruin of a crater that gaped in Karyu’s side like the imprint of some angry giant’s fist.

  Hit!…

  Red-glowing duralloy flared white, blossoming outward in a cloud of million-degree plasma. The crater floor dissolved in light, then gaped open, spilling molten gobbets of metal and burning hydrogen that washed across Van’sGuard like a white-hot sea.

  Then he was through the cloud and into the open. Stabilizing his ship’s spin, he angled his stern toward his line of flight and triggered his drive, full power. The Warhawk bucked and shuddered as he piled on the Gs.

  He’d managed to slip in and deliver his punch, but the battle was still going all wrong, so far as he could tell. The main ships in the Confederation squadron were taking a hellacious pounding. God, Constellation looked like she was nearly done… and Rebel was dead and Christ, where were Cameron and his damned, Naga-jinxed warstriders?

  Vandis had expended his missiles, but he still had his lasers. He would make another pass. At the very least, some of those gunners jacked into Karyu’s fire control might fire at him, instead of at one of his buddies.

  Its velocity in one direction killed, Van’sGuard began accelerating on a new vector, angling back toward the flame-wracked mountain of Karyu.

  Some of Dev’s confidence had deserted him. The battle had been raging for almost two minutes now, and while Karyu had been hit dozens of times, her firepower was unslackened, while his own squadron was dwindling away like a snowball steaming on a hot skillet. If he was going to do it, it had to be now.

  One part of him persisted in wondering if there couldn’t have been another way to do this thing. If Daghar had simply materialized alongside the Karyu, with no initial attack, spilling its payload of Naga-enhanced warstriders, maybe they could have fought their way into the Ryu-carrier without this, this slaughter.

  But the DalRiss ship could not possibly have leaped clear from Alya A to appear alongside the target. They’d had to make the first jump into the system, to a point where Dev could spot Karyu and order the next DalRiss Achiever in line… “jump there.” And with the Imperials warned by that first jump and already going to battle stations, he’d had to use the Confederation squadron to blunt their defensive fire.

  Hadn’t he?

  Hadn’t he?

  The problem with that line of thinking was the realization that ordering Eagle and the human squadron into that hellfire had taken precisely the same commitment of will and discipline and judgment as had the order to invest the life, the “soul” of another Achiever.

  He was using ships and people the way he would use a tool. The way the DalRiss used their gene-tailored biotechnology, Perceivers, Achievers, and all the rest.

  Now he was about to send Katya into that hell, and he didn’t even know whether the scheme of piggybacking Nagas to warstriders would work.

  He’d thought all along that Xenolinking was like being a god in the scope of new vision, the control, the sheer, vast power of control over mind and matter. The problem was, godlike power conferred godlike responsibility… in this case over the lives of his people.

  Over Katya’s life.

  God, what’s happened to me?…

  Chapter 32

  No other art is so founded on uncertainties as is the art of war. A lifetime must be put into its preparation, where its exercise takes but a brief while. Experience cannot be gained at any time, or from the study of anyage, and experience once gained may be put out of date tomorrow.

  —The Art of Modern War

  Colonel Hermann Foertsch

  C.E. 1940

  “Now!” Dev’s mind screamed. “Jump!”

  Daghar vanished from one point in space as an Achiever stretched forth its imagination and will, grasped reality for the first time in its short life… and died. The DalRiss ship reappeared in the same instant it had disappeared, a vast, star-shaped mountain that swallowed the warring Karyu in its shadow. Beyond, the blue-black swirl of storm clouds masking the face of Herakles added the reflection of an eerie, twilight glow to the shadowed Imperial warship.

  A cavern gaped in Daghar’s belly, at a wrinkled twist in its hide where, hours earlier, it had been attached to ShraRish by what could only be described as a tree root, one as thick and as massive as any sequoia. Motes spilled from the cavern, tiny, glittering things that wafted toward Karyu on blue-glowing flickers of magnetic flame, riding the intermeshed lines of force encircling Herakles and the Heraklean sun itself like the currents of a solar wind.

  Guided by Dev and his link through Daghar’s Naga, the motes hurtled toward the Karyu.

  “Go! Go! Go!”

  Katya felt herself falling through the night, suspended, momentarily, between the vast, outstretched arms of the Daghar and the elongated, patchwork clutter of armor and turrets and glowing craters that was an Imperial Ryu-carrier. In another instant, the last of the warstriders was clear and Daghar vanished, reappearing as a star in another part of the sky, the span of a fair-sized continent distant.

  Point defense lasers whirled and canted, as fire control officers noted this new threat and downloaded targeting data and calculations from the carrier’s AI. One battery fired… then another, then a dozen more. To left and to right, above and below, Warlords and Fastriders, Swiftstriders and Ghostriders, warstriders by the dozen flared dazzlingly white as outer layers of armor boiled away into space, as the Naga fragments propelling them first charred, then exploded, unable to handle the megawatt torrents of energy slashing through their mix of natural and artificial cells.

  Katya returned fire. Neither Kurt Allen nor Ryan Green had much to do for the fall across to the Imperial ship, so each took a different weapon and began blazing away, aiming for PDL turrets, targeting radars and fire control towers.

  Halfway across, the Nagas propelling them reversed polarity and began decelerating.

  And warstriders continued to die.

  There they were.

  Vandis had seen the DalRiss ship swim into visibility a kilometer above Karyu’s dorsal surface, blotting out the sun. A moment later, he’d seen the sparkle of the warstriders catching the reflected glare of Herakles as they fell, as they died in the fusillade of defensive fire from the carrier’s dorsal hull mounts.

  Flashing scant meters above Karyu’s armored skin, Van downloaded the commands readying both of his EWC-167 payloads. He’d hung on to them during his first pass since he’d needed to see the target to hit it, and he was damned glad now that he had. A cloudscreen, detonated there, might shield the incoming warstriders for a critical few moments. Steady…

  His Warhawk lurched hard to the left, wobbling out of alignment. Gok! I’m hit!

  A spacecraft flashed past at the edge of Van’s field of vision; his AI captured the image, enhanced it, identified it: an Se-280 Soritaka, one of the best of the Imperial’s frontline interceptors. It was slewing around as it passed, lining up for another shot.…

  … and then it exploded in an eye-searing burst of light and radiant fragments.

  “Nailed him!” Jothan Bailey’s voice cried. “Three-five! See if you can slip a cloudscreen in—”

  “Already on the way!” He delivered the firing command, and a missile bearing an EWC-167 warhead streaked across the convoluted gray landscape, following the targeting guidance he’d fed to its gnat-sized brain moments before.

  The warload detonated an instant later, a silent flowering of silver between Karyu’s hull and the flame-streaked night.

  * * *

  The flash caught Katya by complete surprise, and for a horrible moment she thought she’d
been hit.

  Then she recognized the burst for what it was, a cloudscreen detonated between the surviving warstriders and the Karyu. They were moving fast enough that they would be through the screen in seconds, but in combat seconds routinely measured the fleeting interval between life and death. For a handful of heartbeats, the deadly point defense fire was blocked, the beams scattered and reflected by the silver, mirror’s sheen of the expanding cloud. Elsewhere in the sky, ships were dying, but for that critical instant nearly two hundred warstriders sheltered behind that screen… and lived.

  Then she was through the dispersing cloud of motes. The sensation was almost exactly like that of a warstrider air assault, punching through the cloud layer on flaring jetbacks, dropping toward the surface of a planet. The “ground” was rushing up at Katya, filling her view, as her Naga dragged at the invisible fabric of magnetism in surrounding space, slowing her… slowing her…

  Impact!

  Katya’s Warlord, weightless, but still packing the inertia of a falling, sixty-ton mass, slammed into Karyu’s hull with a concussion that jolted Katya and her crew even through their links.

  Through the link with her Xeno, Katya gave it orders. That way. Her Warlord skimmed low across the surface beneath a silver sky. She’d seen something that way during her descent, a crater, a gap in the Karyu’s armor, a possible gateway to the spacefaring fortress’s inner works.

  Other warstriders were falling out of the silver canopy on every side. “With me, Rangers!” Katya cried. “Charge!”

  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.