Warstrider: All Six Novels and An Original Novella

by Ian Douglas

  Chapter 28

  Remember this maxim of space warfare. Ultimately, all weapons rely one way or another on mass and energy. A nuclear detonation yields tremendous energy in a single devastating burst. Know, however, that an asteroid, a rock, a single loose bolt, given sufficient velocity to yield kinetic energy according o the time-honored formula of E = mc2, can yield more raw, destructive energy than the largest thermonuclear warhead.

  —Strategy and Tactics of Space Warfare

  Imperial Naval War College

  Kyoto, Nihon

  C.E. 2530

  The DalRiss had provided Dev with a tiny compartment buried deep within the heart of the Alyan ship, a place where the atmosphere was identical to that provided by Eagle's life support systems, where the temperature hovered at a warm and somewhat humid thirty-five degrees, where light came from no identifiable source but seemed to bathe every surface of the room in a diffuse and gentle glow.

  That room was like no room aboard any human-built starship. With no corners, no sharp angles, with every surface like every other in the disorienting no-way-is-up of zero gravity, Dev found himself momentarily lost. He was a pro at handling himself in zero-G, of course, but the trick in free fall was to identify some arbitrary direction as "down" and keep convincing your brain that it was. With a little practice and some stubborn make-believe, the body adapted, and the mind could ignore the confusing loss of orientation.

  Here, though, every surface was disturbingly like the inside of a huge, soft, glowing pink stomach . . . no, it was more like a living womb, with fleshy, muscular walls. It wasn't very large, either, and Dev was glad that he'd insisted on overruling Katya when she'd volunteered to come instead. With her claustrophobia, floating in a chamber so narrow that he could touch any two opposite walls with his outstretched arms and could never fully extend his legs . . . well, maybe he was the best one for this test after all. Despite what he'd told her, he'd had his doubts.

  He'd floated across from Eagle wearing a full-body E-suit and been admitted through something disturbingly like a toothless mouth opening in the side of the DalRiss ship. Successive doors had opened before him, guiding him through the lumen of a glowing, slick-surfaced tube that brought to mind other anatomical comparisons that he'd much rather have ignored. A radio voice through the compatch jacked into his left T-socket told him when the atmosphere was right for him; he'd peeled off the E-suit and PLSS unit and left them in one room; now, naked except for the comel he wore on his left arm, he floated with knees curled almost to chest within the warm embrace of his quarters aboard the DalRiss ship.

  "How am I supposed to link from here?" he asked aloud. The air had a faint odor, mildly unpleasant, somewhat sulfurous. He wondered if his hosts were listening to him over the comel or whether the room could pick up his speech and translate it directly. Not that it mattered, but he was interested in the way these people did things.

  In reply, an irregular section of the wall directly in front of him and measuring a full meter across went dark. Slowly, a deeper darkness, inky absence of all light and color began diffusing through the living surface. Shapes swam in the blackness, tarry lumps, ranging in size from the length of his outstretched hand to the size of his head. He'd seen it before more than once and knew immediately what it was.

  Somehow, the ship's Naga had extruded this portion of itself into his cell. Quickly, before he could lose his nerve, he stretched out his left hand and let the comel sink into the blackness. . . .

  Completeness. . . .

  . . . of being . . . of perception . . .

  Well-being. . . .

  Memories . . . of linking with the Naga of GhegnuRish . . . and again on Eridu . . . and still again on Herakles. Information, rich torrents of it . . . and the certain knowledge that I am not alone. . . .

  Loneliness. I/we share that incompleteness.

  Together . . .

  . . . we share . . .

  . . . completeness. . . .

  For Dev, it was as though he'd just jacked in aboard the Eagle. The uterine, claustrophobic room, the black, tarry patch on the wall, the falling sensation of zero-G all were gone. Instead, he felt as though he were hanging alone in space.

  No . . . it was not quite the same as Eagle in one critical respect. He was receiving visual input from every direction at once, viewing a full 360 degrees across two axes. When linked to ship or warstrider, data from all directions could be fed to the jacker, but his own cephlink program filtered out all but the area he was focused on. It was too disorienting otherwise, for beings that had never evolved eyes in the backs of their heads.

  Strange . . . he found he could handle the input, as easily as he could override his own cephlink's programming. Was that part of the change within his own brain? It was difficult, even painful, like stretching muscles long unused, but Dev stretched . . . and found he was making sense of the jumbled cascade of incoming data.

  Half the sky was occupied by GhegnuRish, a vast blur of white clouds and violet seas, of ocher deserts and the flecks of pink and orange that marked the return of life to the long-barren DalRiss homeworld. Opposite, backlit by the searing glare of Alya B, Eagle hung in space like a complex and crisply detailed gray-and-black toy, its hab modules rotating steadily about its long axis just aft of the bow, its strobing anticollision lights pulsing against the blackness of the shadows across its hull. Elsewhere, the host of DalRiss ships gleamed like snowflakes, each pursuing its own orbit about the world.

  With a moment's practice, Dev found that he could voluntarily limit the information flooding through his brain, in effect blocking out the view in all but one direction. But he could also work with that data, and he decided not to exclude anything, at least until he had a better idea of the potentials of this linkage.

  . . . this taste of the universe . . .

  . . . is strange. . . .

  . . . different from any tasted before. . . .

  The Naga's thoughts were an alien turmoil of senses that Dev had experienced before, but only during linkages with other Nagas. He could taste the magnetic field around the ship, for instance, as a kind of smoky, pungent sharpness that brought to mind sensations of a tickle at the back of his throat. He sensed radio as well, pulses felt rather than seen or heard, but bearing with each brush information about direction and strength, with frequency distinguished by a kind of thrumming vibration sensed behind his ears, high-pitched or low, like the unheard trembling of sounds just beyond the range of human hearing.

  Strangest, though, were the changes to his own human senses. His visual field, besides extending across the surface of a complete sphere, seemed distorted, as though he were viewing his surroundings through the light-bending transparency of water and a curved glass surface. Eagle, for instance, was distinctly bowed, as though seen through a fish-eye lens. There were sounds, too, the radio voices of the DalRiss aboard the ship, but they were distorted, hollow and echoing, as though he was hearing them in a dream.

  "Are you in any discomfort?" a DalRiss voice asked. It was feminine but low-pitched, the intonation almost sultry. Other voices droned and murmured in the background, chance-caught snatches of conversation about temperature and pressure, about other ships and orbital paths.

  "I . . . no. I'm not. Things just seem a little strange."

  "For us, too. We have not before shared a human perspective. You were correct in your assessment. The Naga offers a unique bridge between your species and ours, like the comel, but far more complete. The way you see things seems distorted to us and filled with information that is very difficult for us to interpret."

  Well, considering the fact that the DalRiss "saw" reflected sound waves and the ri-glow given off by living creatures rather than light, that was to be expected. The distortions in his surroundings that he was seeing probably had to do with the way his brain was processing the Alyan input to the Alyan-Naga-human symbiosis.

  Or maybe it was because the array of organic visual receptors that was giving him his vi
ew of the outside universe had been designed by people who'd never closely examined a human eye and who had only the fuzziest notion of how the human brain put visual signals together into a meaningful whole.

  Considering all that, they were doing very well indeed.

  "We are ready to move the ship, Dev Cameron. Would you care to suggest a destination?"

  That was part of the purpose of this experiment, to see if humans could control DalRiss ship technology. He hesitated before speaking, however, uncertain of the accuracy of what he was seeing.

  With a moment's practice, though, he'd focused his full attention in that direction . . . blocking out input from every other source. With his cephlink, he opened a secondary window, calling up a three-dimensional display of the stars of human space as they would appear when viewed from over one hundred light-years out.

  Once he blocked out all but the brightest stars of the near-space display, identification was almost automatic. That was Altair, the blue-white beacon that had first attracted DalRiss attention over three years before. And over there was Sirius, and that was Vega, two beacons even brighter and hotter than Altair.

  Once he'd identified Vega, finding Mu Herculis, a yellow spark a handful of light years distant, was simple.

  There . . .

  Dev felt the brush of something moving behind his thoughts, of DalRiss and the far stranger node of twisted perceptions and alien half thoughts that must be the ship's Achiever. Information on the Mu Herculis system downloaded itself into the alien network. He could picture golden Mu Herculis in his mind as he'd seen it last, circled at a distance by the close pair of M4 red dwarfs. The third planet turned beneath the subgiant's brassy, yellow glare; close by, the slender thread of the cast-off sky-el turned end over end in majestic wheelings. He could feel the Achiever absorbing the information, absorbing his memories of being there, the feel of that particular point in space and time.

  Somewhere, deep in the ship, inexplicable energies were gathering. Dev could sense that they were drawn from Quantum Space, but he could not sense the micro-black hole pair of a quantum power tap and could not understand how the ship was accessing energies that, liberated uncontrolled, might have vaporized a fair-sized world. The power was building. . . .

  And then, without fanfare, without fuss, with no more than the unsettling flash of one starscape giving way to another, the Alyan vessel hung in a new space.

  Excitement drummed in every part of Dev's being. He wanted to shout . . . to scream, not with fear but with the sheer, unbridled release of pent-up emotions he'd not even known he possessed. Mu Herculis! There was no mistaking the light of that star, bathing one side of the DalRiss ship now in its warm and glorious breath. And in the other direction, there was Herakles . . . oh, God, no!

  Herakles . . . for one terrifying instant, Dev thought that they'd come out in the wrong star system after all, and then he wondered if possibly they'd emerged, somehow, at the wrong time, arriving over Mu Herculis III in some long-vanished aeon when the world was still under construction.

  For the planet he was looking down on was decidedly not the world he'd left three months ago. It was cloud-swathed, yes, but in black clouds rather than white, and an angry scar glared out of those clouds like a baleful red eye. God of heaven, he could feel its heat through the senses of the DalRiss ship. Around that eye, clouds swirled clockwise in a whirlpool that embraced half a world. Even as he struggled to comprehend what had happened here, Dev's mind supplied the physics: a column of rapidly rising heat was energizing a storm that might have been more appropriate to the atmosphere of Jupiter or some other gas giant. Centered in the world's southern hemisphere, the storm was given its clockwise twist by Coriolus force. That impact scar—the glowing red eye could be nothing else—had punched through the planet's thin crust like an ice pick into fruit. The central eye, he could easily see, was surrounded by a host of red sparks gleaming through the cloud cover.

  Confusion . . .

  "Dev Cameron, we sense confusion and fear in your thoughts."

  "Damn right you do. Somebody's dropped a rock on the planet, and a goking big one."

  . . . or, the detached voice of his own thoughts told him, they gave a small rock a very great deal of speed.

  He stared at Herakles with a hypnotized fascination for endless seconds, then, almost reluctantly, tore his attention away. The DalRiss sensors were picking up ships, displaying them before his mind's eye as golden sparks of light, some slowly circling the stricken world, others scattered across the sky, on extended patrol. Fifteen . . . sixteen . . . eighteen . . . and more, likely, hidden behind the bulk of Herakles.

  Five of those points of light in orbit pulsed brightly, and Dev sensed the power suddenly energizing them.

  "Dev Cameron," a DalRiss voice said, "we have almost certainly been detected."

  Yes, he could feel that too, the throbbing tingle of radar pulses painting the DalRiss ship. He wasn't sure whether the vessel gave off bursts of neutrinos on their emergence into fourspace the way human-manufactured ships did, but the magnetic field would certainly set scanners warbling at considerable distances. Several of the stars marking orbiting Imperial ships were moving. Dev's visual display did not include the conventional graphics of a human-built warship's nav or combat sims, but he didn't need computer-drawn extrapolations of course changes and outbound orbits to know that a sizable number of ships had just broken orbit and was heading toward the lone DalRiss ship.

  "Can we get a closer picture of these ships?" he asked.

  For answer, part of his view of space shimmered, then opened like a flower, revealing a second view of space all but filled by an almost bow-on image of a warship . . . a big warship, built long and flat, tapering somewhat toward the bow and thicker at the stern, with a virtual landscape of towers and gun turrets bristling from nearly every heavily armored surface.

  He recognized the class of vessel almost at once. A kilometer long, massing millions of tons, it was a spacefaring monster, an armed and armored city housing something like five thousand Imperials. The Imperials called them Ryu, or dragonships, and named them after dragons and great birds out of Japanese mythology. With firepower enough to subjugate a world from orbit, with a full wing of eighty or more fighters stored in her hangar bays, a Ryu-ship was the most formidable of all spacefaring warships. Only nine had ever been launched, and one of those, Donryu, the Storm Dragon, had been destroyed during the Imperial assault on Herakles.

  Swiftly, Dev paged through Imperial ship identification files stored in his personal RAM. Each Ryu-class ship was unique in design, with a slightly different silhouette and arrangement of laser and particle gun turrets from its sisters. There! One of eight entries matched perfectly. The vessel bearing down on them now was Karyu, the Fire Dragon. The warbook entry listed her commander as an Admiral Miyagi, though that could have changed. Miyagi was known to the Confederation as a stuffy, somewhat unimaginative officer of the formal school of Imperial naval tactics.

  With firepower like that, though, Miyagi wouldn't need much in the way of imagination. And those other vessels would be Karyu's escorts, a collection of cruisers light and heavy, a number of destroyers and escorts, a section or two of patrolling fighters, plus a contingent of support and logistics vessels . . . perhaps eight or ten vessels all together, and more if this was an invasion fleet.

  Without access to Confederation scanning techniques or AI-assisted identification schemes, Dev couldn't be sure how many ships there were in the Imperial battlefleet. Some of those moving stars—please, God, let it be so!—might be Confederation ships scattered by the Imperial attack. Dev couldn't count on that, though, and he didn't want to think about the alternative.

  But he did notice that there was no sign of Rogue. According to his RAM ephemeris, the free-orbiting sky-el should be visible right there . . . just past the limb of Herakles and on the far side of the world, but he couldn't see it. Was that because they were in the wrong place? Because the DalRiss scanners sim
ply weren't picking it up?

  Or because it wasn't there anymore?

  Dev felt a shuddering, mental chill, like a death-certain premonition of disaster. Rogue had been destroyed. Had Sinclair and the rest of the Confederation government escaped? "DalRiss!" he called suddenly. "Can you listen in on laser and radar emanations from the planet? Can we eavesdrop on them, get a picture of what's going on down there?"

  "Laser, no," the DalRiss said. "We do not have the appropriate receptors, or the mechanism necessary for deciphering the light wave modulation. With the cloud cover, however, we doubt that lasers are being used for communication."

  "That makes sense. What about radio?"

  "There is considerable radio traffic on the surface. Little of it makes sense."

  "Let me hear."

  Noise exploded around him, most of it an eerie and singsong medley of piercing electronic squeals, chirps, and tones. Most of the Imperial traffic—and Confederation communications as well—would be coded and, again, the DalRiss had neither the equipment nor the programs to decipher them.

  There were some voices, though, transmitting in the clear.

  "Susume! Susume! Isoge!"

  "San-ni-roku-hachi-roku-san! Chotto matte! Chotto matte! Moichido itte kudasai!"

  "Dare ka? Mibun shomeisho o misero!"

  "Kageni haire! Utsu! Utsu!"

  Dev willed the voices to fade away. The babble of Nihongo had been so fast and furious he'd not been able to get all of it. Most of the phrases had been various military commands, though, orders to advance, to present identification, to hurry up, and even strings of numbers, probably referring to map coordinates or radio frequencies.

  That last phrase, though, was revealing. Kageni haire was a command to take cover. And it had sounded like the speaker had then been giving the order to fire.

  It sounded as though some Confederation personnel at least were still on the surface of Herakles, fighting on in what must be a last-ditch fight inside a literal hell.

  "Dev Cameron, we should leave. Our sensors are detecting a different type of radar now, possibly associated with that large vessel's weapons-targeting systems."