by Ian Douglas
"Why do you say that?"
"Aw, no disrespect meant, Colonel. It's just that some of the stories . . . Hey, is the who-was about him the straight hont? That he was really linked in with the Xeno down there?"
"Yes. It's true."
"And it didn't hurt him?"
Katya had been hearing who-was—uwasu or rumors—about Dev for months, often enough that Chalmer's question didn't hurt . . . at least not as much as it might have once. She turned the query aside with a mental shrug. "He was fine, last time I saw him."
"I just can't get over the idea of . . . of touching one of those things. Touching a Xeno."
"Why not? That's how we communicate with them."
"Yeah, you've done it too, haven't you, Colonel? On Eridu? I'd forgotten that."
Her reply had been less than completely honest. It was true that humans could communicate with the Naga now if they wore one of the strange DalRiss comels, but Dev's experience with the Heraklean Naga a few months ago had been . . . unique, and far more intimate than any communication Katya had ever experienced with Nagas. As far as any of the medtechs and psych people who'd examined him could tell, Dev had come out of his symbiosis with the Heraklean Naga with no ill effects, physical or mental.
Still, it was impossible not to wonder . . . and worry. Dev had always shown a propensity for a brooding moodiness ever since she'd met him as a warstrider recruit on Loki over three years ago. Since his encounter with the Heraklean Naga, though, he'd seemed . . . darker, somehow. As though the black organism that had briefly linked itself to his body and his mind had also touched his soul.
She didn't like thinking about that.
Why hasn't Dev returned? she asked herself. What's keeping him? Checking her internal RAM's calendar for the third time that day, she noted once again that he was at least a week overdue already. Given the vagaries of mission, of K-T space passages, of loiter times in other systems, there was no reason to worry yet; the due date was simply Eagle's, earliest possible ETA.
Still . . .
The cast-off sky-el was closer now, its silvery length glittering in the sunlight. A number of ships, visible at this distance only as starlike gleams of reflected light, were clustered about the thread's center of spin, but the ascraft was closing on a point some distance out from the center. As the minutes passed, the sky-el's hab center became visible, first as a shadowed thickening in the thread, then as a long, cylindrical structure attached to the el's main body catching sunlight along one edge in a dazzle of white fire. Lights winked in syncopated rhythm with the ascraft's anticollision strobes. A docking collar was illuminated by a circle of harsh spotlights.
For the time being, at least, that cylinder was the location of the Confederation's capital. It seemed a strange place to house a multiworld government.
The Heraklean sky-el's elongated orbit, its end-over-end spin through space, had never been intended by its builders. Normally, a sky-el's towerdown was secured to a suitable spot at the planet's equator; the other end was anchored and held taut well beyond synchorbit by a suitably massive asteroid hauled into place by tugs. Passenger and cargo pods rode up and down the completed tower then on lines of magnetic flux, providing cheap and easy elevator service between ground and synchronous orbit. Only a few colonies did not have one, either because the world had such a slow rotation that synchorbit was impossibly far from the planet's surface, or because—as with Katya's own homeworld of New America—the tides raised by a large, close satellite made building one impractical.
The sky-el tower on Mu Herculis A-III had been raised late in the twenty-fourth century, and terraforming had begun soon after. Within a century and a half, the hot and poisonous prebiotic atmosphere had been transformed to one breathable by humans; too, replacing the carbon dioxide with oxygen and nitrogen had caused the world's mean temperature to plummet forty degrees. The colonial capital of Argos, still partly domed, spread out from the sky-el's towerdown on the Augean Peninsula, a gleaming webwork of habitats, streets, and nanomanufactory farms.
Then, in 2515, the Xeno had appeared.
Seeking the pure metals and exotic materials it could sense from its kilometers-deep tunnels, the vast, amoebic organism had reacted identically to the Xenos of other colony worlds, dispatching pieces of itself to the surface, employing an alien nanotechnology to disassemble those materials—the buildings, domes, habs, and vehicles of a civilization of which the Xeno was completely unaware. After months of battle against the marauding Xeno scouts, the Heraklean population had escaped up the sky-el while Hegemony infantry held off the Xeno attackers for a critical two weeks in a vicious, rear-guard defense. Not long after the handful of surviving troops had been evacuated, and as Xenophobes smashed through the emptied city toward the sky-el's base, a five-hundred–megaton fusion explosion had gouged a half-kilometer-deep crater where Argos had stood; the sky-el, its lower end burned off in the blast, had been catapulted into high orbit by its space-side anchor.
The stress had fragmented much of the sky-el's original length, whipcracking much of the ends, including the anchoring planetoid, into space; what was left, some thirty thousand kilometers of gleaming duralloy weave over ten meters thick, continued to circle the planet in a six-day orbit that brushed the upper reaches of the atmosphere once on each pass. Within the next century or so, those repeated brushes would degrade its orbit enough that the artifact would impact on Herakles.
In the meantime, though, and for the foreseeable future, the free sky-el offered a haven of sorts for the Confederation government. After the sky-el's link with Herakles had been broken, the Hegemony had built a watchpost there to keep an electronic eye on the Heraklean Xeno, attaching a large, cylindrical habitat to the cable, positioning it far enough from the el's center to generate a spin-gravity of roughly half a G. After the explosion that had destroyed Argos, however, the Naga had never reappeared on the surface, and the outpost was eventually abandoned. It had remained empty until the Confederation forces had arrived, just over four months ago.
They called the free-orbiting facility Rogue.
Nudged closer by bursts from maneuvering thrusters, the ascraft rotated smoothly ninety degrees as it matched velocity with the hab's docking collar, then slipped into place with the metallic clangs and thumps of magnetic grapples locking home.
"End of the ride," Chalmer told her. "Hey, Colonel, are you going to be up here long? I mean, maybe we could get together for dinner or some duo simming or something. . . ."
"Negative," Katya said, the word curt. The pilot's attempt at familiarity explained his earlier questions about Dev. Everyone knew that she and Dev were close; Chalmer was prospecting, wondering if she was available while Dev was out-system. Or maybe he was just probing to find out if she still had the same relationship with Dev that she'd had before his bonding with that . . . thing.
Abruptly, she downloaded the mental codes that severed her link with the ascraft's systems. She awoke inside her link module, a padded, partly enclosed ceramplast egg on the shuttle's passenger deck. Blinking at the change in illumination, she lifted the intricate web of gold and silver wires embedded in the base of her left palm from the module's AI interface and unfastened her harness.
The shuttle had docked with the rogue sky-el with its nose oriented toward the center of rotation; sharing the hab's spin-gravity, "down" was now toward the ascraft's tail. Carefully, she swung out of the module while the rest of the passengers were still unstrapping and started climbing the ladder embedded in the deck toward the forward lock. Katya didn't particularly want to see the pilot in person, so she hurried, knowing he was still engaged in shutting down the ascraft's systems. She was afraid that if she met him outside the virtual reality of the link, it might end with Chalmer getting hurt, and she didn't want that. The Confederation was desperately short of qualified shipjackers as it was.
The habitat had been constructed by Hegemony personnel with Imperial technology. The inner door of the hab's lock didn't open; it dissol
ved when air pressure on both sides had matched, as the inner bulkhead's nanotechnic components redefined themselves from an impermeable solid to an elastically bonded gas. Pushing through the barrier's slight resistance, she stepped onto the hab's entry level, and the lock's bulkhead rematerialized at her back.
"Hello, Katya. Welcome to the Rogue."
"General." She felt wary, could feel the gulf that had grown between them. "How . . . are you?"
"Pretty good for someone who's just been killed by one of his subordinates." His wry grin robbed the words of any sting. "Thanks for coming up on such short notice. Have you eaten yet?"
Both Rogue and New Argos were on the same Heraklean clock, and it was well past the midday meal. Her stomach grumbled at the mere thought of food. "No, sir, I haven't. But—"
"Then eat with me, Colonel. Please."
She allowed him to lead her from the entry deck, taking an elevator to Deck Three and the main cafeteria. The room, somewhat cramped but opened up by a viewall looking into space, was not very crowded at this hour, though Katya recognized several Confed naval officers at one of the tables. She wished she could chat with them, but after getting her tray—the meal that day was a nano-grown synthetic resembling sashimi—she followed Sinclair back to another table.
Japanese food, especially any involving even artificial raw fish, was not Katya's favorite. The hab environmental systems, however, had been programmed years ago by the Imperials who'd set up the Heraklean watch station, and in the months since the Confederation had moved in there'd been neither time nor personnel to reprogram the manufactories. She set her tray down opposite Sinclair, who stood for her with his hand over his heart in an almost courtly display of New American etiquette.
Katya had been dreading this meeting, and she was ashamed of the fact. Travis Ewell Sinclair was indisputably brilliant, and scarcely the monster she somehow wanted him to be. The necessities of leadership forced hard choices, she knew, choices not always popular with the people who had to carry them out. The decision to abandon New America in the face of an invasion had been such a choice, as had been the decision to leave behind so many of the men and women who'd been fighting at Katya's side. She understood the military necessity of such command decisions very well. She couldn't be a colonel in the Confederation's ground forces without that understanding.
But neither could she carry out her orders without experiencing a wrenching change in her feelings for the man who'd given them.
"I'm glad you could come, Katya," Sinclair said, taking his seat. He smiled across the table at her. "I . . . have news."
She'd been expecting an official chewing out. The unexpected words startled her and then, as their meaning sank in, Katya's hopes leaped. "Dev?"
Sinclair ran one hand through his hair, which he wore unstylishly long. His hair and beard were dark, but shot through with streaks of gray. "Yes. Captain Cameron's in-system again, and with another prize. I just got word as they were pulling me out of that simulation." He gave her a rueful smile. "You pack quite a punch, young lady. Sometime, you'll have to tell me what the CO of the 1st Rangers was doing in my rear, with eight warstriders!"
"Destroying your mobile artillery, General. Wasn't that obvious? What's Dev's ETA?"
"He should be docking with Rogue in another ten hours."
"Wonderful! How . . . how is he?"
"Seems fine," Sinclair replied. "I ViRcommed with him about an hour ago, while you were on the way up. He said to give you his love."
Katya smiled at that. "Thank you, sir. For telling me."
"That's not why I asked you to come up here."
"Of course not." Here it comes, she thought.
"The last prize that Captain Cameron took had some rather momentous data squirreled away in its shipboard memory."
"Yes?" That apparent swerve from the topic at hand caught her interest. The most important weapon in any war was information—intelligence, in the military lexicon—and a primary source was the data banks of enemy AIs.
"It seems that the ship, an independent trader called the Kasuga Maru, was part of a supply convoy to the Imperial garrison on Alya A-VI a few months ago. While they were in orbit, they recorded a number of radio transmissions between the surface and the Imperial squadron. We're not entirely sure what's happening out there, but it sounds as though the DalRiss have attacked an Imperial ground base."
"Attacked it! Why?"
"We don't know. But if the report is true, it puts a new and higher priority on Operation Farstar."
Katya paused, the chopsticks holding a bit of artificial raw fish hovering between a dish of fiery-hot mustard and her mouth. Slowly, she returned the morsel to the plate and set the chopsticks down. Her hunger was forgotten, as was her dislike for Sinclair.
"I'd say it's about goddamned time."
"You still want to be a part of it?"
"Of course. If anything's going to end this damned war, Farstar is it."
"I agree. And your feelings about Dev Cameron going along?"
She had to think about how to answer that one, though she knew what her gut feelings said. "It'll be good to have him along, of course. For a number of reasons." And not just because this would be a long, long trip, and she loved him and hated the idea of perhaps another year away from his side. "I suspect that the real question is how he feels about it, though. And how you plan to handle . . . handle it while he's gone. It wouldn't do to leave Herakles defenseless while we're off gallivanting with the DalRiss."
"Oh, we won't be defenseless. Dev's not the only one who can Xenolink. But there has been, ah, speculation about how well he's recovered after his experience. I was wondering how you felt about Dev linking with you on this—"
"You were sure enough of Dev to let him take Eagle out commerce raiding." Her reply was harsher than she'd intended. "Why should this be any different?"
"Because you'll be dealing with the DalRiss. And you may well be linking with a Naga again. With another Naga, the one at Alya B. The strangeness factor's going to be something awful. I want to know that you can handle it. And that you think he can."
"If Dev Cameron can't handle it," Katya said quietly, "nobody can!"
"That," Sinclair said with a small grin, "is exactly what I wanted to hear."
And maybe it'll be good to get away from here, Katya told herself. Just me and Dev and a few thousand warstriders. Like old times!
She wondered what Dev was going to say when he heard. Most of the final plans for Farstar had been put together after he'd left. She imagined, though, that he would be pleased. He'd not been at all happy with the possibility of Xenolinking again, not after what had happened during the Imperial assault on Herakles.
A long diplomatic mission to a people still largely incomprehensible to humans might be exactly what he needed.
Chapter 6
Cephlink technology extends human productivity by reducing the time necessary to achieve expertise.
Cephlink technology increases personal stress levels by reducing the time necessary to acquire physical experience.
—Fielding's First and Second Laws
Man and His Works
Dr. Karl Gunther Fielding
C.E. 2448
Eagle rendezvoused with the Rogue's hub fifteen hours after dropping out of K-T space. The Kasuga Maru, with her lower acceleration, would not arrive in Heraklean orbit for some days yet, but the treasure trove discovered in her AI by her prize crew during the long passage home had been transferred to a high-density molecular datachip, which Dev was now hand-carrying to the Confederation AI technicians on the Rogue.
Eagle was too large to dock directly with the slow-turning fragment of sky-el. Instead, she took up a parking orbit with the rest of the tiny Confederation fleet a few hundred kilometers clear of the segment's rotational hub. There were perhaps thirty vessels in orbit now, mostly freighters, transports, and small escort vessels, frigates and corvettes. Standing out among the others was the sleek, planoform liner Translu
xus, formerly a Star Lines passenger ship, now the rather luxuriously appointed transportation for the Confederation Congress. She hung ten kilometers off, agleam in the golden light of Mu Herculis, with only a small service and maintenance crew aboard her.
After seeing to Eagle and the establishment of orbital routine—and consulting with Lieutenant Canady about watch schedules and liberty aboard the Rogue—Dev ferried across in a work shuttle. Docking at the hub, he transferred to a rider pod, a small capsule that tapped the centrifugal force created by the sky-el's spin and slid "down" a magnetic rail to the hab modules at the half-G level.
The hab's travel concourse was a large and comfortably furnished compartment, but one made crowded by people waiting for pods to or from other parts of the sky-el, or who, like Dev, were newly arrived. The far bulkhead created the illusion of roominess, with its curved viewall set to display a panorama of space dominated by the half sphere of Herakles.
Sinclair and part of his personal staff were waiting for Dev as he broke free of the crowd by the travel pod locks. The New American general and political philosopher was the only man present in civilian clothes, including a formal, white half-cape. The rest wore military uniforms, two-toned gray like Dev's own bodysuit for navy, two-toned brown for army. Within both the military and the government of the young Confederation, such niceties as details of dress uniforms were still in a state of flux. Even something as basic as ranks were still confused, with the rebels still in the process of switching from the Nihongo system favored by the Hegemony to one based on the old, pre-Hegemony systems. Though designs could easily be changed simply by reprogramming the nano that manufactured such articles as bodysuits and rank insignia, it was actually difficult to standardize such things, given the sheer size and dispersion of the forces involved, especially under the press of more urgent business. Dev noted with mild amusement that despite the impressive show of ceremony, most of the uniforms and the rank and service insignia at their collars didn't match, and one navy captain in Sinclair's entourage wore the dress whites of Hegemony service, with a taisa's three chrysanthemum pips at his collar. That was understandable, of course. Most of the Confederation's naval personnel had once served with the Hegemony navy.