by Ian Douglas
"But first, the DalRiss are going to use her to help us."
"You, you'll be coordinating the Confederation fleet from there?" Katya asked.
"That's the idea. It'll be like the Xenolink on Herakles again, only this time, I'll be directing a warfleet."
"But how does that help us with the coordination?" Curtis asked. "Okay, you're in a DalRiss ship. Fine. How do you talk to the rest of us? I thought you said the DalRiss couldn't even handle lasercom transmissions."
"I'm coming to that," Dev said. "Now, warstriders are self-contained combat machines, capable of fighting in any environment, right? Miniature space ships, warflyers, if you like, but with legs instead of propulsion units and reaction mass."
Bailey grinned. "Hell, Commodore. I always thought of warflyers as warstriders with plasma jets instead of legs." Several at the table laughed nervously.
"Either way," Dev said. "The point is, we have one wing of warflyers, eighty-odd ships. Captain Bailey? What're our chances of taking out the Karyu with eighty flyers?"
Bailey shook his head, frowning. "Not good, sir. Not good at goking all. If you could work the big ships in close enough to take out most of their PDLs first, well, maybe. But we'd lose a lot of good boys and girls in the process. And you'd probably lose Eagle and Constellation and the rest."
"That was my feeling, too. Now, what if we take, say, two battalions of Katya's warstriders. Two, maybe three hundred machines. We bring them aboard a DalRiss ship, one of the big ones, like Daghar, where a fragment of the GhegnuRish Naga is waiting for them. Each warstrider accepts a fragment of that Naga, after we tell it what we want, of course. We then use the DalRiss ship to deposit those warstriders where we want them in space, as close to the Karyu as we can get them."
There was a sudden rush of noise around the table, sharp intakes of breath, the bump of chairs against floor or table, several shouts.
"Christ, Commodore!"
"That's nuts!"
"Is he crazy?"
Katya's eyes met Dev's and held them, burning. "Dev, you want my people to link with Xenos?"
"Symbionts," Dev told them. He grinned. "A three-way combination of Naga fragments, DalRiss comels, and humans. And here's the way it's going to work. . . ."
Chapter 30
" . . . so there I was, comin' in like this, see, and he pulls a wing-over hard to the left but I seen it comin' and I just slide in on his six, sweet and slick as your lover's ass. He started jinkin' of course, but I locked on, got tone, and cut loose. Sweet Jesus, you shoulda' seen the goker burn!"
—Lieutenant Harriman Douglass
In the ViRdocumentary Spacefighter
C.E. 2375
Nearly thirty hours later, Katya met Dev in the cargo hold of an ascraft slung from Eagle's belly, the same ascraft, in fact, that they'd made love in once before, just before the expeditionary fleet had departed Mu Herculis. The canisters of organic precursors were gone, now, used up during the passage to Alya or transferred to other storage compartments aboard the Eagle as space had become available. The nightmare that had ended that last rendezvous was forgotten now, replaced by the excitement of discovery, and by an urgent, almost frantic passion that acknowledged, tacitly, that this could be the last time.
Certainly, it would be the last opportunity they had to be alone together for some time to come. Ever since Dev had given the final set of orders, both of them had been working furiously to prepare for the return to Herakles, an operation that Jothan Bailey had dubbed "Changeling." Katya's troops and Bailey's flyers all had been briefed, their plans drawn up, communications protocols worked out with the DalRiss.
Next, the First and Second Battalions of the 1st Rangers had been flown to the Daghar, where, one by one, they'd met smaller pieces of the huge ship's controlling Naga fragment. Each small fragment, measuring two or three meters across and massing a couple of tons, had flowed out from the ten-thousand-ton mass of the big fragment at the heart of the grounded DalRiss ship-city and encased a warstrider's legs and lower torso. Slender extrusions had grown their way along sensor and power conduits and infiltrated the entire internal system of each warstrider; a physical link with the pilot provided communications—and the new means of coordination Dev had been looking for.
At the same time, the DalRiss city that the humans had known as Migrant Camp was breaking up, the thousands of mobile buildings and their DalRiss parasite-occupants moving well back from the starfish-shaped mountain of the city-ship. When the last warstrider was finally aboard and the city completely evacuated, the DalRiss had expended a single Achiever. There was a thunderclap, an explosion of sky-rending noise as the vacuum remaining when the huge ship vanished was suddenly and catastrophically filled. Daghar had reappeared in orbit over ShraRish, in company with the human squadron and the growing fleet of smaller DalRiss ships. On the ground, the Migrant Camp DalRiss had begun moving once more, crawling toward a new site, where they would begin growing a new city-ship for their eventual exodus from their world.
Katya, after seeing to her troops aboard the Daghar, had crawled through one of the winding tunnels of the DalRiss ship and into Eagle, which was being held to Daghar's flank by an extrusion of the Naga. Soon, after completing some necessary planning with the human squadron's senior officers, both she and Dev would return to the DalRiss ship.
First, though, they found these minutes for each other. As before, the two of them clung to one another in free fall, linked at the waist by the slender tether of the tsunagi nawa. Katya had needed this time. Even more, she'd needed to talk to Dev in privacy.
"Something's changed in you," she told him, holding him close. "Again."
"Oh? How have I changed?"
"I'm not sure. You're more certain of yourself. And more committed to, to the cause, I think. More than you've ever been before. But I'm scared."
"What about?"
"You're going to be Xenolinking again."
"A lot of us are going to be Xenolinking, you included."
She shook her head. "That's not the same thing, and you know it. The rest of us, we'll just be touching a small Naga fragment, the one we have on our striders. You'll be tied in with a big fragment, bigger than the one that took you to Herakles and back. It's the difference between having a compatch jacked into your socket, and being in full linkage."
She'd tried to tell herself that this wouldn't be the same as when Dev linked with the planetary Naga on Herakles. These two-ton fragments she and the rest of her people would be linking with would be nothing like the incredible repository of knowledge and power and memory of a full planetary Naga.
She also knew, deep down, that mass wasn't the issue. Dev was being transformed by this damned physical and mental communion with the Xenophobes, and each experience seemed to take him farther from her.
He smiled at her, but his eyes were cold and a little distant. "That's no reason for you to be scared, Kat."
"I think it is. Not my Xenolink, that I can handle. Maybe not even yours, though I feel like you've . . . surrendered to that addiction you told me about once. No, Dev, I'm afraid I'm losing you. These past few days you've been, well, growing. In ways I don't understand. Once you were afraid you weren't human anymore. Now I'm beginning to wonder if you're not more than human, somehow. The way you know things without being told . . ."
" . . . is fundamentally no different from the artificial enhancements provided by our cephlinks," he finished for her. "Through our links, we have direct access to AI-controlled hardware, to information, to instant communications that we take for granted, but that our ancestors would think was pure magic."
"You didn't want to Xenolink again."
"Hmm. Yeah, I was scared of linking again. But I feel differently about that now. When I linked with the DalRiss ship, with the Naga fragment in that ship, I mean, I was in control. I was me. If anything, the larger fragment in Daghar ought to give me even more control. Over my surroundings, and over me. And I'll need it, too, if we're going to pull this o
ff."
Daghar's Naga fragment was still only a tiny, tiny fraction of the mass of the Heraklean Naga. Still . . . would linking with it sweep Dev up in the madness that had embraced him on Herakles, that storm- and lightning-torn day when the sky had gone black and a man-become-god had hurled rocks into the heavens, challenging an Imperial battle group to single combat?
Just the name of the DalRiss bio-construct—Daghar—filled Katya with unease. She'd learned from Brenda Ortiz that the DalRiss did not have distinctive names for their ships as human vessels did, and their cities were given temporary and changeable names that apparently reflected some aspect of their creation. The human contingent of the fleet, however, had taken to calling the ship by the name of the city. "Moving Toward Joining" indeed! Dev was going to join with that monster, and she was terrified that she would never see him again.
"You know," Dev said, interrupting bleak thoughts, "we ought to get back. I want to talk to the DalRiss about how many Achievers they're going to have along in storage."
He started to fumble for the tsunagi nawa, trying to release the catch. Reaching down, she took his hand, moving it away. "Not yet," she whispered. "Please . . . once more . . . once more now . . ."
She felt a flush of embarrassment as she said it, knowing what the words sounded like. She knew, though, that it was not lust that was driving her as she coupled once more with Dev Cameron, but rather a deeper, a more fundamental need untouched by the passion that had brought them together in the first place.
Inwardly, she directed a coded thought checking one part of her implant, a molecule-thick plating of silver, silicon, and gold physically entwined with the cells of her hypothalamus. It was still switched off.
Good. . . .
She gasped as Dev's touch sent a burning shudder pulsingthrough her body.
Chujo Takeshi Miyagi had been sleeping when an aide called him.
Three days earlier, a mysterious vessel shaped like a hitode, a giant starfish, had winked briefly into existence a few tens of thousands of kilometers from HerakJes. The vessel had been closely examined by teleoperated probes orbiting in the region, which had relayed detailed images back to Karyu, and he was certain that the visitor had been a DalRiss ship. He'd read reports filed by the Imperial Alyan Mission released by Earth and Japanese Military Intelligence, and he knew that Alyan ships could be starfish-shaped, and he knew they could materialize anywhere, just as the first had appeared near Altair three . . . no, four years ago, now.
He'd also read the reports that indicated the Alyans were hostile, having attacked the Imperial Mission.
He'd certainly not expected an Alyan ship to appear here, however, and the incident had left him uneasy. Assuming the vessel to be hostile, he'd first ordered Karyu and several of her escorts to break orbit and close with the intruder; when it had ignored his repeated lasercom demands for identification and communication, he'd ordered Karyu's missile batteries to fire.
For three days, now, he'd wondered if he'd done the right thing, wondered if, possibly, there'd been some kind of breakdown in communications that had led to some dreadful mistake. For a time, he'd half expected the stranger to appear again, this time with a fleet behind it, and weapons impossible even to imagine. Against that possibility, he'd loosed more teleoperated probes, and he'd put all of Otori Squadron on special alert, extending patrols of frigates and corvettes farther out from Mu Herculis A and ordering meticulous and continuous scanning sweeps of all surrounding space with radar, ladar, and infrared searches.
As the hours had passed, however, Miyagi had begun to allow himself to relax. The DalRiss vessel, if that was what it had been, had been in sight for only a few minutes, and it had vanished within seconds of Karyu's missile launch. Possibly, he reasoned, he'd glimpsed a refugee from Alya; he'd heard rumors, passed on by one of his destroyer captains newly arrived from Earth, that an Imperial fleet was on its way to the Theta Serpentis suns to deal with the DalRiss for their unprovoked attack on the Imperial Mission. The stranger might have been fleeing that battle . . . though Miyagi could not understand why they'd chosen this system as a refuge. True, they were aliens, and like all gaijin they did not reason in logical ways. Still . . .
After nearly three full days, however, Miyagi was exhausted. He'd remained linked in the tacnet for nearly that entire time, relying on the link module hardware to feed him and care for his body's physical needs, on brief, private periods of alpha stimulation to keep him refreshed and alert.
But the strain was beginning to tell. He'd told himself that he was serving no cause, fulfilling no duty with the exhausting mental stress of continual linkage. The campaign on Herakles was going well, the victory over the Confederation fleet had been as complete as any in history. Finally, he'd broken the link in order to get a real meal and some real sleep.
He'd gone to bed, as was his habit, in a small compartment in Karyu's zero-gravity habitat, strapped to a bulkhead with Velcro fasteners to keep him from drifting with the currents from the air circulation ducts. Fifty-one minutes after strapping himself in, by the time function in his cephlink, his aide was shaking him awake. "Chujosama! Chujosama!" The man's normally impassive face was creased with worry. "Please, sir, wake up!"
"Eh? I'm awake. I'm awake. What is it, Fukkansan?"
"The Alyan strangers, sir. They're back!"
"Strangers . . . what? When?"
"Minutes ago, Chujosama. But they are close! Less than ten thousand kilometers!"
"Chikusho!" He groped for the straps, rugging them free. His aide began helping him with his uniform. "Is it just the one again?"
"I am sorry to say, no, Chujosama. We have counted at least ten Alyan craft, ranging in size from approximately that of a large destroyer, to one vessel that is at least twice the size of Karyu."
"Baka-ni suruna-yo!" Miyagi snapped. "Don't think I'm stupid!"
"Sir!" Somehow, the aide managed an abject bow in zero gravity, no mean feat when he was adrift in the middle of the room. "Please, sir! It is the complete truth!"
"We will see."
And Miyagi saw, moments later, as he jacked into Karyu's tactical simulation. The Alyan craft—damn it, they had to be Alyans, for nothing of human manufacture looked remotely like those bizarre, bump-surfaced shapes with their stubby arms and hulls like rusted iron—the Alyans were grouped in a ragged, spherical shape with their largest vessel hanging toward the rear, and they were accelerating toward the Otori flagship at an estimated four gravities. There was no sign of plasma flare, no ion trails, not even a neutrino flux to give clues to the weird-looking vessels' power plants. There was an unusual magnetic flux encasing each ship, a pulsing, rippling flow of power that might be propulsion, or it might be some kind of weapon.
Seconds after he linked into the net, eight more Alyan ships appeared . . . or were they? The first ten were starfish shapes, differing one from another in numbers of arms and in overall size, but all essentially of the same design. These newcomers were different, lumpy, organic shapes that looked more like dark-skinned escapees from some giant's vegetable garden than starfaring vessels. And these ships were spilling neutrinos . . . not to mention radar and ladar signatures that identified them as human-built and human-manned ships.
"Battle stations," Miyagi said softly. The order was picked up by the tactical net and broadcast throughout all the ships of the Imperial battlefleet, though most of the warships were already on full alert. "Shosho Kima? Are you on the net?"
"Hai, Chujosan!"
"Bring all weapons to full power. This looks like an attack formation of some kind."
"I agree, Chujosan. All weapons are at full power and standing by. We are tracking the targets."
"Excellent. Has there been any attempt at communication?"
"We have been querying them for identification since they appeared. There has been no reply."
"Ah." Miyagi watched the approaching vessels, suddenly uncertain. The hell of a battlefleet command was that there was no higher authority
to appeal to . . . save for that of the Imperial Staff Command back at Earth. A wrong guess, a wrong move, a misstep in diplomacy or a stupid underestimation of a military foe, and at best his naval career would be ruined. At worst, well, even the modern and enlightened Dai Nihon still expected those of its servants bearing the greatest responsibilities to apologize for their mistakes with their lives. It was, Miyagi had always thought, an excellent system, one that wonderfully focused an officer's attention on his duty.
The enemy ships were well within range and still approaching. "Stand by to fire."
"Hai, Chujosan!"
Miyagi sensed the awesome power of the Karyu gathering about him. . . .
The Alyans approached the core of the Imperial battle group in two formations. In the lead were ten Alyan "warships," the starfish shapes, including the enormous bulk of Daghar. Trailing by a thousand kilometers came eight DalRiss transports, each carrying a Confederation vessel in its bowels.
The Imperials, Dev thought with a barely suppressed quiver of anticipation, must be beside themselves by now. The incoming ships would be unlike anything the Imperials had ever tracked; the transports would look bizarrely alien, yet their electronic signatures would include spills from the human-built ships in their bellies, neutrinos from powered-up fusion plants, and the questing fingers of weapons radars and laser ranging devices peeking through the Alyan ships' flexible and immensely adaptable hulls.
Linked into the Naga that was Daghar's brain and nerves and senses, Dev felt the prick and tingle of Imperial track and search radar, and he knew that gigawatts of raw energy were about to be released. He'd been counting seconds, steadily and automatically, since the first DalRiss ships had broken into fourspace. He was estimating four minutes from the time the Alyan fleet was first sighted to their decision to open fire.
At two hundred seconds, some part of his hyperawareness overrode his intent to count out another forty. The Imperial commander must be steeling himself now to give the order to fire.