by Ian Douglas
Shaken by the slaughter, shaken worse by his new insight into the bloody workings of his own mind, Dev extended his will, reaching out to the other DalRiss ships. He'd hoped to keep the other DalRiss vessels out of it. Maybe, he thought, he was still thinking like a human after all: I can't ask that of them.
And neither could he watch the slaughter of his people and do nothing.
In lightning pulses of thought, he relayed his last orders to the far-flung network of DalRiss ships. The DalRiss ships themselves were unarmed, but extrusions of the Naga fragment nested within each provided a weapon as devastating as any in the Confederation or Imperial arsenals. Drawing on the Dal-ships for power, the Nagas generated intense, tightly focused magnetic fields, using them to accelerate kilogram-sized chunks of themselves to speeds of hundreds of kilometers per second.
An Imperial light cruiser overhauling Karyu from astern took a chain of five hard-flung projectiles in rapid-fire succession, the impacts flaring white-hot in searing explosions of vaporized armor and escaping gases. The bow section of the cruiser shattered, the rest of the vessel's length crumpling and folding and splitting wide open beneath that storm of high-velocity death. A corvette took three rounds and vanished in a dazzling nova-flash of light.
Daghar, meanwhile, was moving again, gathering its energies for yet another short-range leap. Dev, his thoughts flickering from vessel to vessel, momentarily sought the bright node of familiar warmth that was Katya. Was she even still alive after descending through that wall of fire?
Yes! He sensed her through her Naga's touch. Briefly, he glimpsed her surroundings through her Warlord's sensors . . . a storm of laser and particle beam fire as she led twenty or thirty of her warstriders toward a gaping, flame-shot maw opening in the side of the Imperial carrier.
But enemy fighters wheeled toward her. She wasn't going to make it. . . .
"Niner-niner," Dev said. "This is Changeling. Get ready, everybody! I'm going to provide a diversion with the Daghar! You're all on your own! When you see your chance, take it and go!"
Goodbye, Katya. . . .
"Good luck, all of you. . . ."
Jump! . . .
So far, the entire battle had been taking place in Herakles's orbit, with all of the vessels involved moving at more or less the same velocity and, except for the back-and-forth slashes of the highly maneuverable fighters, in more or less the same direction.
Now, though, the small suns tucked away within the cavernous overhangs of Karyu's stem flashed on. Cones of charged particles, as hot as the wind sweeping from the face of the sun, blasted astern, driving the monster carrier's ponderous bulk slowly forward, and when by chance they swept across Daring's riddled and dying hulk, they turned armor incandescent and killed instantly every man and woman still alive aboard the crippled corvette.
Faster and faster. Under one gravity of acceleration, the carrier broke orbit, angling out and away from the storm-wracked planet. Those ships that could still move and maneuver followed, Imperial and Confederation both. The hulks—Rebel and Daring and the dead Imperial escorts—the cripples—Constellation and the powerless light cruiser—remained in Heraklean orbit, falling farther and farther behind.
"They're moving!" Katya cried over the tacnet. "The bastards are moving out!" The side of the crater lunged toward her, slammed against her Warlord's hull . . . and then suddenly there was gravity again as acceleration dragged at the strider's frame. Katya's orientation swung wildly for a moment, bringing with it a stab of vertigo. Down was that way, toward Karyu's stern, and she was balanced on the lip of a giant crater, together with a handful of other warstriders as the carrier drove "upward" into space.
For a moment, she wondered if the Imperials were running, but immediately she discarded the idea. No, damn it, the Impies were winning . . . winning! By breaking orbit, they could lose the Constellation, which was continuing to snipe at the Imperial ships even though her main drive was down, and they might well shake some of the other ships that were snapping at her fire-torn flanks like hunting dogs. So far, the only thing keeping the Confederation ships alive was the fact the Karyu herself offered pretty good cover.
The enemy fighters had momentarily vanished from the sky, but they would be back, matching accelerations with the Karyu and continuing to blast the warstriders from their toeholds on her hull.
Then Daghar was back, two kilometers away and so huge it filled that half of the sky, making Katya feel as though she was clinging to the side of a cliff in a steep-sided valley, with canyon walls extending above and below her for as far as she could see.
She'd heard Dev's transmission, but she'd been too busy at the moment for its meaning to seep through to awareness. Kuso, what was the damned fool doing now? . . .
At a range of two kilometers, Dev was throwing rocks again . . . kilogram-sized chunks of the Naga itself, accelerated to high speed and hurled across the narrow gap into Karyu's stern section, just forward of the ravening blast of her flaring plasma drives.
In a ship as large and as massive as the Karyu, the vast majority of the ship's hull is armor, or fuel tankage, or skyscraper-sized masses of circuits and power feeds, fusorpacks and sensor leads, all of them multiply redundant and with remarkably few vulnerable points. Ryu-class carriers were designed to survive, which meant there were no isolated places that could be precisely targeted for a kill . . . or simply taken out by a stray, lucky shot.
At point-blank range, though, Dev could target the general area directly ahead of Karyu's huge drive venturis. Somewhere beneath meter upon meter of duralloy and fabricrete plating would be the fusion chambers that fed those flaming suns astern . . . and the pumps that fed them with cryo-H, the lasers that flashed the hydrogen to fusion heat, the fusorpack-driven generators that powered the magnetic bottles and containment fields.
A stream of pellets slammed into Karyu's dorsal hull with an impact felt throughout the ship like the blasting of a jack hammer against a tin roof. Cubic meters of duralloy and steel vaporized; a crater yawned; inner circuitry and power feeds and tubing flashed and vanished like cotton in the blast of a blowtorch.
For a fraction of a second, the fusion reaction in Karyu's drive chamber threatened to run wild. As magnetic grids failed, though, the ship's AI recognized the danger of imminent containment field failure and scrammed the entire network. The ship's driving suns winked out. . . .
"Fire control!" Admiral Miyagi screamed over the combat net. "Concentrate on that damned alien!" The ship's drive had just cut out, and they were in free-fall once more. In another moment, that gaijin starfish would peel the mighty Karyu open from stern to bow. "Kill it! Kill it!"
Karyu's remaining weapons swung about, tracking the Alyan monster. The fighters shifted aim too, loosing the first of a swarm of missiles against the huge DalRiss ship's hull.
Zero-G again. Katya drifted above the gaping crater in Karyu's side. The other warstriders that had been trapped with her and been freed when the carrier stopped accelerating were flashing past her and into the cavern. Others, those that had been caught by surprise when the Ryu began accelerating, were catching up now, flashing in from astern on hard-driven Naga mag fields. It was almost eerily peaceful in her small part of the battlefield. The fighters were gone, the PDL fire was concentrating on another target.
Katya was unable to move, however, unable to will the Warlord into the yawning darkness of that cave. Her full attention was focused on the Daghar, drifting now a little way astern of the Karyu. Imperial fire was tearing into the Alyan city-ship; its organic hide was not nearly so tough or so resilient as duralloy, or the other artificial, nano-layered materials of human technology. Missiles slammed home, each one burying deep beneath the ship-creature's hide before detonating, each detonation flinging huge, fiercely radiating chunks of tissue into space.
It looked as though the entire, star-shaped mass was burning with a radiant, white-glaring flame.
"God!" she screamed. "God! No! Dev!"
The DalRiss s
hip's explosion lit the blackness of space like the utterly silent, eye-searing flash of a supernova.
Chapter 33
We pay a high price for being intelligent. Wisdom hurts.
—Elektra
Euripides
413 B.C.E.
Once the Confederation warstriders smashed their way on board the Imperial Ryu-carrier, the outcome of the battle was a foregone conclusion. There were Imperial Marines aboard the Karyu, and several thousand surviving crewmen, despite heavy losses during the battle, but Imperial naval vessels did not routinely carry the sort of weapons, as shipboard sidearms, that would make any impression at all against a warstrider.
Katya learned later that teams of warstriders, too large and bulky and clumsy to move or stand upright within the thousands of kilometers of passageways filling that city-sized ship, had dragged themselves along with weapon-heavy arms gouging and clawing into centimeter-thick bulkheads, or propelled themselves with the magnetic push of their Nagas, burrowing headfirst like enormous, duralloy-sheathed moles, tearing up decks, smashing down partitions, plowing through every barrier in their path. Each time they burned or smashed their way through interior bulkheads into a new section, they were met by storms of escaping atmosphere that shrieked out through the opening in whirling snowstorms of freezing water vapor and air. As assault teams moved ahead, the ship's damage control systems sealed off breaches behind them and repressurized those areas of the ship that had been depressurized, but those systems could only take so much punishment before they started to fail. More and more Confederation strider teams blasted their way aboard, some through air locks, some through shattered gun turrets and external hardpoints, and most, like those with Katya, through the breaches blasted open by naval gunfire and warflyer assault and missiles, and soon whole sections of the ship were closing down as cold, hard vacuum claimed their passageways and compartments, and severed power feeds plunged them into darkness.
In all, 265 Rangers made it aboard the Karyu and began fighting their way forward, one passageway at a time. Imperial Marines, many in heavy armor, fought back, but the only casualty was the pilot of a Scoutstrider that had already suffered heavy damage from laser fire during the approach. The hand laser fire from a team of Imperial Marines blew an already weakened access panel; when the circuit boards beyond vaporized, a bolt of high-amp current downloaded through the unfortunate pilot's brain, killing him instantly.
Marines or crew personnel who tried to make stands at critical corridor junctions were fried by blasts from lasers or particle guns, or cut down by blasts from hivel cannons or machine guns. Few of the defenders cared to stand in place and fight back when the corridor-filling bulk of a Ghostrider or Swiftstrider dragged itself into view. As a result, many of the ship's larger compartments—recreation decks and barracks, supply vaults and hangar bays—grew more and more crowded with ship's personnel who'd given up the fight and were simply looking for a place, anyplace, to escape the crawling, armored behemoths. Those who could reach Karyu's escape pods and lifeboats abandoned ship, filling circumambient space with the drifting sparkle of strobing emergency beacons.
Miyagi broadcast a general call to all personnel to fight to the death. Few in his crew had radios or compatches, however, and most intercom channels were off-line by that time, so the only ones to get the order were the marines. These retreated when they could and fought to the death when they had to. Soon it was clear that even the most valiant efforts—headlong, zero-G charges down fire-filled corridors dragging satchels of explosives—could avail nothing against warstriders, which could spot such teams as soon as they came into view and sweep them with laser or projectile fire.
Twenty-eight minutes after the first warstriders smashed their way through blast-charred bulkheads and into the still-pressurized portion of the ship, the first warstriders reached the bridge, buried at the ship's core some two hundred meters from the first entry point. At that point, a pale and shaking Admiral Miyagi emerged from the link module from which he'd been directing the battle, then brought the muzzle of his own laser pistol to his head and pulled the trigger.
His second-in-command broadcast the call for surrender.
Katya saw little of this at the time. Dev was dead . . . dead. The agony of that realization filled her mind, blocking her thoughts, blinding her to the battle that was continuing to flash and stab across the heavens. She knew that she ought to join the fight. Damn it all . . . this amounted to dereliction of duty, hanging here in space watching men die.
She opened her link to the Naga, urging it to move.
She failed.
Oh, kuso. She ran a diagnostic, found nothing wrong, and tried again. Still nothing. "Kurt? Ryan?"
"We're here, Colonel."
"I . . . I'm having some trouble."
Kurt's voice sounded a bit distant. "I think there's a fault. Maybe in the interface with the Naga. I'm working on it."
"We'll hold position here okay," Ryan told her. "Don't think they'll be needing us, though. Everything looks pretty much in hand."
"I'm . . . I'm sorry about the commodore, Colonel," Kurt Allen said. "I know you two were pretty close."
"Yeah. We were . . . close."
"Can we do anything?"
"Sign off. Let me . . . deal with it. Okay?"
"Sure, Colonel," Ryan said. "We'll be on sentry, and jacked in if you need us."
"And let me know as soon as you have the problem fixed. We should . . . should be moving."
The rest of the battle was clearly almost over. Though the human ships had been badly handled, the surviving DalRiss vessels, most still fresh and relatively untouched by the storm thus far, were continuing to hurl their high-velocity projectiles, slamming them one after another into the Imperial ships. Even before Karyu gave up, several of the smaller Imperial ships were drawing off at high speed. When Karyu's XO broadcast his surrender, the rest of the Imperial battlefleet was already more than willing to break off the fight and begin accelerating for open space. One after another, they arrowed out into the night beyond Herakles's orbit, then vanished into K-T space.
The Confederation ships, content to hold what they'd won in orbit, did not pursue.
Against all odds, the Confederation—and their DalRiss allies—were victorious.
But at what cost?
Katya stared at the fuzzy, glowing cloud that was keeping pace with the Karyu on its outbound orbit—Daghar's funeral pyre, still radiating the fierce heat of its brief, furious ignition. The debris from that explosion continued to drift out from the center of the blast, retaining the velocity it had had before the explosion. Since they'd already achieved escape velocity from Herakles, it would no doubt fall into an extended and highly elliptical orbit around Mu Herculis.
Katya had already probed that cloud with her Warlord's radar. The largest piece she'd been able to find measured perhaps a meter across . . . one meter, out of a structure that once had been two thousand meters across.
"Oh, Dev!" She cried out, suddenly overcome by a devastating loneliness. "Dev!"
"I'm . . . here, Katya."
The jolt nearly knocked her off-line. She said nothing, but stared wildly into the glowing mist left from the explosion, here thoughts racing. Oh, God oh God I'm going mad he's dead I must've brain-burned oh dear God he's dead oh God—
"Please, Katya. You're not crazy. And . . . I don't think I am, either."
"Dev . . . Dev . . ." She stopped, groping for feelings that were whipcracking through her brain. Dev you goker don't do this to me you can't possibly be alive!
But she ran a quick systems check, looking for the source of the feed that was carrying that voice, so eerily like Dev's on-line speech.
It was coming through the Naga.
"You know how we've speculated about the Naga?" Dev's voice asked her. "About how their subcellular makeup is an awful lot like networks of human neurons . . . but it's also like a computer network, in a way, with lots and lots of separate processors. That's how th
ey can encode memories that, that go back billions of years, in matrices of nanotechnic subcells."
You're dead I saw you die oh Dev, Dev, Dev I miss you so much!
"I miss you too, love. And I guess I am dead, in a way. My body certainly died in that explosion."
That jolted her too, but the shock smashed the chain of uncontrollable thoughts racing through her brain, made her stop and pull her thinking back into some semblance of rational cause and effect, stimulus and response.
"Dev?"
"Yes, Katya."
"Where are you?"
"I . . . I think I'm in the network of Naga fragments in the DalRiss fleet. I find . . . yes. I find I can shift from ship to ship. I'm in your warstrider now. With you. At least a part of me is."
The thought was at once bizarre, almost horrible . . . and reassuring.
"We've known for a long time that Nagas are very good at patterning things. And they can think . . . very quickly. Faster than the DalRiss. Somehow, I'm still not sure how, they, they patterned my thoughts. Made a replica of me, I guess, but as an electronic pattern, stored within the matrix of their organic computers."
"Are you . . . are you real? Or a copy?" The questions hurt, brutally direct.
"Kat, that question is meaningless. I remember myself as Dev Cameron. I remember my whole life . . . better, I think, than I ever could with a brain of flesh and blood. I remember . . . oh, God. Things from when I was little. My mother. My father . . ."
"Dev . . ."
"I remember making love with you in that ascraft." She felt him smile. "Twice."
"I saw Daghar explode."
"Yes."
"Your body was destroyed."
"Yes. But, well . . . where is your mind, Katya?"
"Mind is the interaction of all of the patterns of neural stimuli in the active brain, Dev. There's no such thing as a mind apart from body. There's no such thing as a soul."
"I used to believe that. I'm not so sure now. The DalRiss know a hell of a lot more about how brain and body work than we do, and I think, I think that they believe in souls. Spirits, if you like.