Warstrider: All Six Novels and An Original Novella

by Ian Douglas

  "Group Two!" he called out over his link. "Leapfrog, now!"

  During the planning sessions back at ShraRish, Dev never had been able to explain to the DalRiss what leapfrog was, but the concept was clear enough, in any case. The trailing squadron vanished from normal space . . .

  . . . and reappeared instantly ten thousand kilometers closer to their goal, inside the core of the Imperial battlefleet and less than half a thousand kilometers from the Karyu herself.

  "Group One! Shift now!"

  The ten starfish winked out, dropping back into fourspace well behind Group Two, and angling in toward the planet, a feint designed to draw the fire of other Imperial ships. Karyu launched a salvo of missiles in the same heartbeat, followed, two beats later, by the flicker of lasers and accelerated particle beams.

  Dev felt the familiar drumbeat of excitement thundering in his linkage, the godlike thrill of destiny and power and martial glory. "Niner-niner!" he cried over the radio linkage, a code phrase meaning the call was for all spacecraft. "This is Sword. Commence fire!"

  "Targeting systems."

  "Go."

  "Life-support."

  "And go."

  "Communications. Switch off ship ICS. Going to squadron tactical."

  "Switching to squadron taccom, and testing: alfa, bravo, charlie . . ."

  "Reading you on taccom, Three-five. Comtest is go."

  Van's mind wandered as Commander Cole went on to check the comm circuits of the rest of the squadron's warflyers. Fighter pilots had a certain reputation, one reputedly going back centuries to the very first men to risk their lives in fragile, aerial combat machines, a reputation for being hard-living, hard-loving, hard-fighting bundles of testosterone and machismo. More often than not, the female members of the squadron came across as harder than the males, as though they had to work harder to prove that they were part of the fighter pilot fraternity.

  Still, that image had always been more for public consumption than a reality shared among the pilots themselves. A good pilot was part of an intricate and smooth-running machine, an intimate part of a team and not the lone wolf of popular ViRdrama. In many ways, he was more engineer than warrior, and jacking fighter or warflyer in combat more often than not required ice-cold focus and concentration, not fire-and-blood bravado.

  Sublieutenant Vandis had nonetheless done his best to live up to the image, a responsibility always encouraged by the other members of his squadron, men and women alike, whether they were drinking with yujies in a public bar, or sharing there-I-was war stories with fellow pilots. It had been a long, long time, though, since he'd mingled in what the fraternity called "the real world," so long that Vandis was beginning to think there was no world but the tight, close camaraderie of the junior officers' mess and the squadron ready room.

  Kuso, the last time he'd been in a dirtside bar had been back on New America, just before the Impie invasion, hell, almost a year ago, now. He and Marlo had jacked the tails of those three militia leggers. The last time he'd had real sex, the sweating, dirty, skin-on-skin kind with a willing stranger, instead of the canned fantasies of ViRsex . . . yeah, the same night as the bar episode. Memories of that sweet little ningyo could still trigger erotic dreams.

  For nearly an entire year, then, he'd been living aboard the Zed, enclosed by gray walls, rarely seeing anyone but shipboard technicians and maintenance personnel, his yujies in Gold Squadron, and the other pilots of 1st Wing. He'd recjacked a lot, of course, including some fun and enthusiastic jackin'Jill three-ways with Lynn Kosta and Carey Graham, Gold Squadron's two female pilots, but Van had always preferred the real thing to electronic feeds, and gok the jackers who claimed you couldn't tell the difference.

  He was sick of shipboard life. He wanted to walk dirt again . . . civilized dirt, not a vacant desert like Herakles or an alien jumble of surrealist art and jack-feed hallucinations like ShraRish.

  Van recognized that at least part of the frustration was this endless waiting in the dark, figurative and real, waiting for the order to launch. He was used to watching the battle unfold in his tac feed; even if he was a helpless spectator, at least he knew what the hell was going on!

  But Tarazed had been engulfed hours ago by one of those monster DalRiss transports. Since there were no electronic feeds from the Alyan ship to its cargo, the Zed was riding along in the darkness too, unable to present a tactical feed to the warflyers resting in the converted tanker's bays and launch tubes. The only word Van had about the outside universe were periodic verbal updates by either Commander Cole or the Wing CO, Captain Bailey.

  "Right, everybody," Cole's voice said. "Twelve for twelve, checked and ready. Gold Eagle set for launch." The Skipper sounded taut and hard, maybe a bit worried. Well, who the hell in their right mind wouldn't be worried right now? He tried to picture Gold Eagle's principal target, the Ryu-carrier, stretching across the heavens like a mobile fortress, then gave it up. He was nervous enough without deliberately conjuring up nightmares.

  "Wish they'd get a move on out there," Sublieutenant Carey Graham said, her voice as sharp-edged as a monofilament blade.

  "Watch," Cal Schmidt said with a chuckle. "They'll wait until things are in a goking mess, then send us in to—"

  "Damp it down, Gold!" Cole's voice snapped. "Fleet feed coming through!"

  "Warflyer wing! This is Sword!"

  The new voice came in through his cephlink by way of Van'sGuard's new DalRiss radio circuit. Van recognized the voice—none other than Deadly Dev himself.

  "Your transport has just made a tactical shift and is less than eight hundred kilometers from your primary target. The larger ships will move in first and try to hammer down the Imperials' PDLs and close defenses. I'll give you the word to launch in about thirty more seconds."

  Thirty more seconds. Van felt a quiver at the back of his thoughts, what his body might have felt as an anticipatory shudder rising from the hollow in the pit of his stomach. Strange. Commodore Cameron's voice, his voiced thoughts, rather, had sounded fast-paced, almost racing. There'd been all kinds of who-was spreading through the Tarazed for the past few months, rumors that Cameron had mutated into some kind of Naga-human hybrid, rumors that he'd developed strange new mental powers, rumors that he'd formed a symbiotic link with the DalRiss. Van had discounted all of those stories as the mental short-circuitings of men and women cooped up too long without outside input. A fighter squadron was like any other close-knit group of people; deprive them of outside stimulus and they began creating their own.

  Time . . . time . . . God, it had been twenty seconds already. When were they going to get the word?

  "Warflyers! This is Sword!" Static swirled and spat. "Stand by!"

  Come on! Come on!

  "Launch warflyers!"

  "Gold Squadron, launch!"

  Stars exploded around Van's head.

  Chapter 31

  The entire concept of space fighters needs a serious review by experts unbiased by the wilder and more romantic notions of this type of combat. After all, the exploits of fighter pilots have been the staple of the cheaper sort of fiction and ViRdrama for so long, it is necessary to examine the problem with a cold and skeptical eye. Consider! A space fighter, massing fifteen, maybe twenty tons, armed with a few lasers and some ship-to-ship missiles . . . how is such a toy going to fare against a behemoth massing a million times more? How is the pilot to get close enough to employ his weapons, how can he hope to survive even a near miss by a particle beam powerful enough to burn through meter-thick duralloy sheath?

  —Shosho Nobuo Fujiwara

  Testimony before the Imperial Staff Command during hearings on military research appropriations

  C.E. 2439

  Dev's order loosed the warflyers from Tarazed's launch tubes, minnows to Karyu's whale flung into the darkness four at a time. An instant after the DalRiss transports shifted in close to the Imperial squadron, the carrier had opened fire. Most of the shots missed completely, the ranging and targeting locks br
oken by the sudden spatial shifts of the Alyan ships. One DalRiss vessel, though, the one carrying the Constellation, glowed a dazzling white for an instant as megawatt lasers seared across its hull.

  Now the other Alyan transports were already opening up, however, unfolding like bizarre flowers, disgorging their cargoes, then flickering away into nothingness like fleeting wraiths. Constellation had to break free of the kilometer-wide starfish that had carried it this far, accelerating sharply on glowing starbursts of blue-white plasma; the Alyan ship, jolted by the release, began tumbling slowly through space, a hazy fog of crystallizing water vapor and air slowly englobing it.

  No human mind could have followed the rapid pace of events. Dev, his perceptions working at superhuman speed, could scarcely keep up.

  "Rebel! Move in close, toward the bow," Dev ordered. "Suppress the main laser batteries there and keep them from sniping at the fighters!" His thoughts, picked up by the Naga aboard Daghar, were relayed through DalRiss organic radios to comel-equipped communications personnel aboard each Confederation vessel. "Tarazed! Start launching your wing, and keep launching, no matter what! Constellation, focus on the Ryu's big guns, but keep an eye on those escorts! They're coming up fast astern! Intrepid! Daring! Missiles! Use your missiles!"

  The Xenolink fed a steady chatter of voices back to Dev, scraps and snatches of conversations between ships, between pilots and gunners, even—as high-pitched electronic warbles that meant nothing to Dev—between the guiding AIs of the Confederation vessels.

  "This is Audacious! We've got a heavy concentration of fire coming up from three-five-niner. Charlie . . . see if you can give us some support there. . . ."

  " . . . launching fighters! . . ."

  " . . . One-two, this is One-five. Damn it, Gold, where are you?"

  "Niner-niner, this is Eagle. We have two Imperial frigates coming up the Ryu's stern. Constellation, how about giving us some support here? . . ."

  "Watch it! Watch it! We're taking fire from those bow guns!"

  "We're hit! Rebel's hit! Oh Jesus God Jesus! . . ."

  Rebel, cutting close past the Karyu less than one hundred meters above the monster ship's prow, was speared by twin lances of coherent light that slashed her open from hab modules to stern, spilling slush hydrogen into space in a vast, sparkling, amoebic cloud.

  To Dev's mind's eye, he seemed to be adrift in space, aware of his entire surroundings, though he'd narrowed the focus of his newly enlarged vision to that three-dimensional area of space where the battle was rapidly unfolding. At such impossibly close quarters and at relatively low speeds, things were happening with bewildering rapidity. He winced as he heard Rebel's death scream, winced again as a short-range missile sank into the frigate's hull and detonated with a silent, piercing strobe of blue-white light. He'd hoped to get the Confederation ships in so close that only a fraction of Karyu's batteries could bear, but so heavily armed and armored was the Ryu-ship that a fraction of her firepower could still be devastating to relatively small and thin-skinned craft like a frigate.

  Seconds later, however, two spreads of missiles launched by Eagle and Constellation slammed into Karyu's dorsal surface. High-explosive warheads detonated in rippling, silently popping flashes that peeled open the big ship's duralloy skin in gaping, black-edged blotches, smashed weapons turrets, crumpled communications and fire control towers, and penetrated far enough to explode within deeply buried spaces. Karyu fired back; Eagle was struck in her port fairing by a laser beam that momentarily overloaded her power feeds to every weapons turret on that flank. With her portside PDLs off-line, a missile penetrated her ventral surface and detonated with a savage concussion. Air shrieked through ruptured bulkheads on decks three and four, and two ascraft cradled in their transport racks were transformed into twisted, half-molten wrecks.

  "Eagle!" Dev called. "Get closer! Get closer!" Safety—relative safety—for the Confederation squadron lay in moving so close to the Imperial giant that other Japanese vessels didn't dare fire for fear of hitting their flagship, while Karyu herself could not bring her full firepower to bear on any one target.

  "Damn it, Commodore, I'm as close as I can goddamn get!" Lisa Canady's voice snapped back. "Any closer and I'll be goking the bastard!"

  But Eagle did begin moving closer, her 395-meter length sliding into the ink black shadow of the far larger Karyu. Huge patches on both warships were alive now with sullen red and orange heat, twisted, fiercely radiating scars where warheads had turned duralloy into glowing slag. Canady was cleverly maneuvering the Confederation destroyer into a dead zone behind and beneath the Karyu, where most of the larger vessel's turrets had been smashed by Constellation's missile barrage a moment before. The two Imperial frigates, however, were moving in fast, angling so close to Karyu's hull that they could open fire on the Confederation ships without danger of hitting their larger consort.

  Throughout the battle, the ten DalRiss ships of Group One had attracted little attention at all, though some missiles were inbound from a pair of enemy destroyers just coming over the Heraklean horizon. Using the DalRiss vessels to decoy Imperial fire, it appeared, had been less than successful; the Imperial fire control officers were ignoring the unknown quantities represented by the Alyan ships and were concentrating instead on targets with well-known potentials. Fighters were beginning to spill belatedly from the Karyu, as her wing scrambled and launched.

  Military starships, whether corvettes or Ryu-carriers, were not designed for combat at ranges measured in meters rather than kilometers. Dev was shocked to realize that less than ten seconds had passed since the opening volleys had been fired, and the Confederation fleet had already been savaged.

  At this rate, they wouldn't be able to keep fighting for very much longer.

  "Whee-ooo!" Sublieutenant Vandis screamed into his linkage as his Warhawk blasted from the launch tube in Tarazed's ventral hull, a yell of sheer exultation. The convoluted, black-gray complexity of Zed's hull flashed past his awareness; for an instant, golden sunlight bathed him in warm light, and then he was plunging once more into shadow. The immense bulk of Karyu loomed above and ahead, blocking the sun as Vandis triggered his thrusters and lunged ahead at a thundering 5 Gs.

  "This is Three-five, in the clear!"

  "And Three-seven," Marlo'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 seeping 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 starsh
ip, 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 comel 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.