by Ian Douglas
"You all head on back to base," Katya told the others. "I'm going to stay here."
"Katya . . ." Vic began.
"Damn it, Vic! Get out of here!"
"Let's go, people," Sinclair said. "Katya and Lanager will keep watch here, just . . . just in case Dev makes it out."
He didn't sound as though he believed it.
Katya knew she didn't. Somehow, though, she still couldn't make herself believe that he was really gone.
The other warstriders filed away, leaving the Ghostrider in motionless, silent mourning outside the man-made mountain.
Chapter 24
If humans are master technicians, the beings known as Xenophobes are master chemists, possessing, apparently, a number of inward-turned senses that can analyze individual molecules in great detail. It is quite likely that they grow and program their own nano, and that much of their consciousness centers around, not their surroundings, but their own, inner workings.
It has been suggested that this peculiar evolution arose to keep creatures sane that, though possessing super-genius minds, remain locked away for eons in the black bowels of their unchanging caverns.
—Reflections on Intelligence
Jame Carlyle
C.E. 2543
Three days later, the Imperial squadron dropped out of K-T space on the fringes of the Mu Herculis system. Two Kako-class cruisers, Haguro and Kinugasa. Four light cruisers, Nagara, Mogami, Suzuya, and the newly grown and assembled Zintu. Four destroyers, including the Amatukaze-class Urakaze, "the Wind in the Bay." A dozen lesser craft, corvettes and light-hulled frigates.
And leading them all was Kawashima's flagship, the massive, kilometer-long dragonship Donryu.
Kawashima was linked into Donryu's AI network, with schematics of the system unfolding with a computer's speed and crisp precision before his inner eye. Green diamonds glowed against the backdrop of stars, one embracing the golden glare of Mu Herculis A and almost lost in its light, a second surrounding the dim, red speck that was the system's red dwarf pair, and a third tagging a single, brilliant white star shining just to one side of the primary. The graphic diamonds marked nearby sources of neutrinos; the stars produced neutrinos naturally, as part of the nuclear processes burning in their cores; the white "star," however, was not a star, but a planet. A quick check of Donryu's data base called up long scrolls of data on the Mu Herculis system. The world was Mu Herculis A III, and both the planet's surface and nearby space should be dead, with all fusion plants shut down years ago. The neutrinos marking the planet indicated that someone was using fusion plants there, that they'd either fired up the big power system aboard the orbiting fragment of the sky-el, or they were generating power aboard orbiting spacecraft and with smaller plants on the ground.
Kawashima had guessed right.
Certain at first that Cameron must have gone to Lung Chi, he'd changed his mind after reflecting further. The young rebel Cameron, after all, knew as well as did Kawashima that the Imperium had full access to the histories of both him and his father. Cameron would guess, surely, that any deliberate search for him must include the Lung Chi system, even if the searchers were unaware that he had with him a fragment of tame Xenophobe and hoped to use it to make contact with the strange beings.
Dev Cameron's record, or such of it as he had access to through Donryu's data base, indicated that he had a talent for doing the unexpected. If he thought the Empire might search for him at Lung Chi, he would go to Mu Herculis instead.
Or not. The damned gaijin rebel was capable of carrying the they-know-that-I-know game back through any number of regressions. But Kawashima's gut instinct insisted that Cameron had brought the refugees from New America here, to a Xeno-dead system that no one had even thought about for twenty years. Just in case he'd guessed wrong, Kawashima had sent the remainder of Ohka Squadron—minus the destroyers he'd left at New America and the smaller craft sent to check Loki, An-Nur II, and Sandoval—to Lung Chi.
But the rebels, Kawashima had been certain throughout the month-long voyage from 26 Draconis, would be here.
Donryu's AI swiftly sorted through the flood of data swept up by the flagship's scanners, analyzing it and feeding the conclusions through to her masters. The neutrinos were from a number of sources, all closely clustered together either in low orbit or on the Heraklean surface itself. The orbital sources were consistent with the neutrino signature of ten to fifteen shipboard fusion plants set to low output, plus numerous smaller ones . . . a picture wholly consistent with the number of ships stolen from the Imperial shipyard at Daikoku and the raiders that had taken them. The ground sources were smaller and much more tightly grouped, fusorpacks aboard warstriders or other large vehicles, most likely, and possibly base or shipboard fusion plants as well.
He'd found the rebels.
"Captain Obayashi," he called, rasping out the order over the ship's link network.
"Hai, Chujosan!" Gonichi Obayashi was Donryu's commanding officer, Kawashima's flag captain in the parlance of an earlier, seafaring age. An efficient, tight-discipline officer with an impressive record, he'd commanded a cruiser during the Alyan Expedition and received command of Donryu as reward.
"We will implement the Noguchi option. Please make all necessary preparations."
"Ah." He could almost hear the reordering of Obaya-shi's thoughts. "Sir. So bold a maneuver could have unfortunate—"
"Please implement the Noguchi option, Obayashisan." He edged the polite phrasing with duralloy. "Indulge me."
There was the slightest of hesitations. "Hai. It will take a few moments for the program to run."
"Notify me when you are ready to engage. And pass the order to the other vessels in the squadron. When we move, we will move together."
Noguchi was the name of a mathematics wizard—some called him the modern Einstein—who lived and worked at Tsukinoshi, on Earth's moon. The Noguchi Equations were a complex set of variable field matrices that allowed shipboard AIs to better calculate the effects of local space curvature on orbiting singularities and to adjust the singularity harmonic tuning more precisely. In effect, they permitted warships to leave and enter K-T space far more deeply within the complex gravity wells of an inner planetary system than had ever been possible before.
Starship captains, a notoriously conservative lot, still resisted taking their huge and expensive charges under K-T drive closer than one or two astronomical units to a star; nor were the Noguchi Equations foolproof. Several vessels had been lost while experimenting with the new programs, and complex multiple star systems such as 26 Draconis increased the chance of disaster to near certainty.
Mu Herculis, however, was a simpler system; the B and C stellar components were small and far away, and Herakles, unlike New America, had no moon.
And if Kawashima took Ohka Squadron into the inner system in the normal way, it would be several days before they reached Herakles and entered planetary orbit. The rebels—he checked his inner timekeeping sense, then cross-checked it with the navsim feed—would know the Imperials had arrived in another three hundred minutes. By the time the Imperials reached the planet, the rebels would be packed up and gone, accelerating toward the far side of the Mu Herculis system at 4 Gs or better.
If he could jump closer now, however, before his own ship's neutrinos crawling planetward at light speed warned the rebels of the squadron's arrival, they would achieve complete and devastating surprise.
Such surprise was worth the risk. Kawashima wanted these people, wanted to end this ragtag revolution once and for all. Embers might smolder still on New America and Eridu, but with the leaders dead or mind-strung puppets, there would be no Confederation, no rebellion.
Within his link, he felt the flow of orders between ships, the data feeds, the terse acknowledgments. The special inner system control programs were running on all ships.
"Ohka Squadron, attention to orders!" he called, rapping out the command with brisk and military efficiency. He named four of the smaller shi
ps in his group. "Motiduki, Oboro, Amagiri, Tomoduru. You will maintain course and speed through fourspace. Seek to cut off stragglers or damaged vessels that escape our net." As the acknowledgments flashed back from the frigates, he addressed the rest of his ships. "The rest of you, come with me. We will appear out of nowhere and confound these rebels who scorn the name and honor of our Emperor. Dai Nihon! Banzai! Banzai!"
The cheering echoes of the replies across the squadron's link net were still ringing within Kawashima's mind as he gave the mental order. As one, eleven Imperial capital ships and eight frigates and corvettes vanished from normal space.
"RED ALERT! RED ALERT! ALL HANDS TO BATTLE STATIONS!. . ."
The link-downloaded call jolted Katya, dragging her up from dark and smothering musings. She'd been off duty and had taken the time to wander a little way from the Mount Athos base, finding a rocky crag overlooking the sweep of what once had been the Augean Peninsula.
It had been three days. Dev must really be dead.
She pulled out a communicator and snicked the jack home in her right T-socket. "COM Control!" she snapped. "This is Alessandro! What is it?"
"Colonel, it's an Imperial fleet! We read nineteen targets, closing fast!"
"What range?"
"About eight hundred thousand kilometers—"
"What? How the hell did they get that close? Was somebody asleep on the jack?"
"Negative, negative, Colonel! They just, just appeared! Dropped out of K-T space a few moments ago! I saw them emerge on the broad-scan radar!"
"Kuso! I'll be right there!"
Katya sprinted back up the slope to the rebel base, which by unspoken popular assent had become known as Morgan's Hold. It was a long run, but she was in good shape and the nano meteffectors in her bloodstream were designed to enhance her physical performance on demand. She reached the fabricrete dome housing the base command center out of breath, with heart pounding, but on the way up she'd been able to tap a direct feed of data from the base, relayed down from orbit from the Tarazed. Eleven capital ships, including a Ryu-class, almost certainly the Donryu. Eight lesser craft. How in all the bleak hells of Buddha had the Impie bastards managed to figure out so quickly where the rebels had gone? And how had they managed to fine-tune their drives so precisely that they could emerge from the K-T plenum practically next door to Herakles?
"What's the status on our ships?" she shouted as she burst into the command center. It was a utilitarian control room, a bit cramped, lined with link couches and centered on a holoprojector that was currently showing a view of Herakles from space. The long, ruler-straight thread of the cast-off space elevator hung to one side. Nearby, a cluster of gold pinpoints hovered in space—the Confederation fleet. Outward, at the very edge of the projection field, a cluster of red lights gleamed balefully.
The Imperials were shockingly close.
"Almost to full-power and ready to break orbit," Sinclair told her. She was vaguely aware of a half dozen other senior military officers there in the control room with him, Grier and Darwin Smith among them, but their ashen faces were fixed on the projection. She doubted that they even knew she was there. The couches were occupied, for the most part, by younger men and women, coordinating the communications and battle control for fleet and ground forces.
"We weren't expecting them so soon," Sinclair said.
It took a moment for Katya to realize he was speaking to her. "Well, it was bound to happen sooner or later," she replied. "They must be on the jack over there, though, to have figured it out this fast."
"We're pretty well goked," he said, the crudity shocking on his lips. "Our ground forces are deployed around Mount Athos, but we don't have any place else even surveyed except for the atmosphere plant. Our space squadron isn't going to get clear in time. That damned Ryu is going to have them for breakfast."
She looked at Sinclair, caught by the pain in his voice. He was, she decided, a man forced to make a desperate choice, who'd just seen the result of that decision and knew he'd failed completely in his purpose. She could feel her anger and resentment of him, of his ordering Dev into that tunnel, evaporating.
I never did get the hang of ordering my people into certain death, she thought. Maybe that's something no commander ever gets used to.
"If our fleet can get away," she said gently, "then maybe we can disperse into the Outback. We can wait them out."
Sinclair looked at her, one eyebrow climbing. "This isn't New America, Katya. There's not much to eat out there but what we can nanogrow for ourselves. And there's no cover. They'll land their assault forces and hunt us down."
"We could try the tunnel system under the air generator," she suggested. "It's a labyrinth down there. We could set up traps, ambushes. If they ever managed to find us they'd be sorry they did."
Sinclair nodded. "Maybe. Maybe so. But we'll be a hell of a lot worse off than we would have been back on New America, you know. The rebellion . . ."
"Right now we have to worry about survival, General. The politics will come later. If we make it."
Reluctantly, he nodded.
On the holoprojection, the Imperial ships were moving closer with terrifying speed.
Self continued to savor this bizarrely constructed and articulated not-Self form, cast so precipitously onto the fringe of Here. The . . . form was not Self, nor was it >>self<<, and the mysteries of its existence piled one upon the other in jumbled confusion.
It knew, now, that the form was called a human, that it was at least as intelligent as most >>selves<< and possibly more so, but that its memories and thinking processes were ordered quite differently from the Boolean is/is-not categorization of Self.
When the not-Self had first hurtled into the not-Rock niche within Mother Rock, Self had been ready to devour it, to absorb its mineral wealth, to leach out everything of value and distribute its very molecules throughout the whole that was Self. Curiosity had stayed that first impulse, however. The not-Self was harmless now, skinned of its shell of remarkably pure and intricately worked metals and artificial materials. It was vulnerable, easily manipulated, easily controlled and explored.
Self would have been able to understand nothing had it not been for the >>self<< discovered within the not-Rock passage. Assimilated into Self now, its memories circulating within the Whole, that alien >>self<< bore images, thoughts, and wonders incomprehensible.
So much that was new to think about!
Self's first action had been to probe the human, savoring it chemically. Among the data stored within the alien >>self<< were memories of another encounter with a human in that other, distant Here. Had that been the same human as this? It was hard to tell, but it seemed unlikely. The remembered tastes of that human were quite different from these, more alkaline, with a different balance of certain metabolic chemistries. Still, the two were similar enough for gross explorations. . . .
That remembered human had been acquired on the surface of the Void and carried deep into Mother Rock. There, that other Self—such a strange thought, that, another Self—had entered the human . . . this way. . . .
Smells and flavors—the closest human approximations to senses for which there were no names—assailed Self. The human tasted of hydrocarbons and salts, of metals and wonderfully complex carbon chains, of a fine covering of artificial substances layered over most of its form. One appendage was sheathed in something else . . . hydrocarbons and long-chain polymers, substantially different in certain key ways from the rest of the not-Self, almost as though it were an entirely different creature.
No! It was a different creature, in symbiosis with the first! It called itself a comel and served as a bridge for thought and memory. A comel had been on the remembered human as well. How strange . . . and how wonderful!
Curiosity had burned, bright as a hot volcanic vent, drawing Self on. For Self, each new discovery was an Event, marking the passage of time. Thousands . . . no, tens of thousands of Events passed in flickering succession, discovery following
discovery in bewildering array.
Shortly after the human had arrived, Self had learned that it was broken. It functioned still, after a fashion, and in a low-metabolic, energy-conserving state . . . but that curious chain of interlocking calcium nodules that stiffened the creature's main, central segment had clearly been broken, interfering with the transmission of neural impulses throughout its central nervous system. Other calcium structures had broken as well; Self compared the structures of his not-Self and the remembered one. This should be arranged that way . . . and this part should be like this. . . .
Countless gross differences between the human in memory and the reality Here were incomprehensible. The organs for the elimination of liquid waste, for example, were bizarrely different in this specimen than from those remembered by the alien >>self<<, and there were other differences, of chemistries, of fuzzygrowths on the thing's surface, of layered deposits of fat. Self decided that these gross differences were natural and should be left alone; their organization and complex functionality suggested evolutionary design rather than damage.
But on a finer level, the two organisms were identical, and . . . if the >>self's<< memories were any guide, this human's systems were rapidly failing. Self had begun experimenting, adding certain hastily constructed molecules a few at a time, and tasting the results.
Yes . . . that was the way. A touch here, a few molecules of a slightly altered hydrocarbon chain added there . . .
More time passed, Event piling upon Event.
Contact with the human was actually dangerous for Self. The creature possessed within its being a complex and interwoven network of tubules for circulating liquid throughout its body mass; the liquid within those tubules was an electrolytic solution almost identical in nature to the great, electrolyte-laden reservoirs of liquid water that overlaid some parts of the Rock along its interface with the Void. Contact tended to disrupt the electrical activity within Self's being, causing a sharp and unpleasant sensation that could be called pain.