by Ian Douglas
Other squadrons, he saw, were being called in from distant star systems, but since the only way to move instantaneously between the stars was as a rider within one of the huge DalRiss city ships, it was clearly going to take time to organize and transport any out-system reinforcements. Everything—every hope of victory—would depend on whether Admiral Kurebayashi's little squadron could slow the cloud long enough to enable other forces to reach Sol in time; Dev had already taken a hard and realistic look at the odds and decided that Kurebayashi would not slow the Web's advance by so much as a millisecond. The Web machines would overwhelm Yamato and the other Imperial warships in moments. Most of the Webbers would stream right past without even slowing, and there was nothing that Yamato or any other ship in the Solar System could do about it.
While occupying Hachiman, Dev tried once again to reach the Overmind. Damn it, he could feel it stirring, like a vast, dark movement within the unimaginably deep and murky waters of the virtual sea around him. But Dev could not reach it . . . could not even conceive of a way to try to attract its attention. Had he not seen it in action at Nova Aquila, he would have dismissed it now, for it was less an independent pattern of thought and purpose than a dull, rumbling cacophony of countless minds and thoughts, blind and purposeless. Trying to contact such a ponderous and insensible collection of chaotic inertia was like shouting into a hurricane, attempting to challenge the wind and lightning themselves.
Conceding failure at last, Dev accessed an online image of Earth as seen high in the Lunar sky over Hachiman, a blue half-globe aswirl with dazzling white. Earth as humans had seen it for six hundred years now, frail and delicate in the night.
And he knew that there was nothing he could do to stop the apocalypse that was swiftly descending on it with implacable, ruthless resolve.
Chapter 15
One must not always use the same modes of operation against the enemy, even though they seem to be working out successfully. Often enough the enemy will become used to them, adapt to them, and inflict disaster on us.
—The Strategicon
THE EMPEROR MAURICE
C.E. 600
"We can't assemble a fleet quickly enough," Katya said grimly. "We have five DalRiss cityships here at New America now, and four of them are with the Imperial squadron. They'll be moving out-system, back to defend Sol, any moment now."
"The majority of the cityships are still at High Frontier," Dev pointed out. He had rejoined the others in the virtual representation of Cascadia, to find that Gresham had left the meeting during his absence, leaving Vic and Katya, Kara, Daren and Taki . . . now truly a family gathering. "Or with the Unified Fleet, at Nova Aquila. Most of them are redeploying too."
"I imagine the Imperials there will be scrambling to get their task force back to Sol, and tagging every DalRiss they can find," Kara said. Tagging was the term used in the Confederation to refer to convincing a DalRiss cityship to carry a vessel from one star system to another. The idea had taken a while to catch on only because it was difficult to figure out what the DalRiss might want in exchange for the service. Lately, DalRiss ships had been very much in demand for fast transport . . . and the astonishing thing was that they did not expect payment for this very real service that they performed.
What Dev had learned in his twenty-five years-plus of living and working with the beings—and what most other humans seemed to have a lot of trouble understanding—was that the DalRiss saw such service as their part in what they called the "Dance of Life," a way of participating in the society that had become theirs when the Web had turned their home stars into novae.
"I've often wondered," Vic said with a tight smile, "what would happen if things came down to war between Empire and Confederation again. Both sides use the DalRiss for fast transport now. Would they both try to corner the market in available DalRiss ships? Or get the DalRiss to fire at their friends who happened to've been tagged by the other side?"
"The reason the DalRiss never seem to take sides," Dev told them, "is that, frankly, they have a lot of difficulty telling the difference between us and the Japanese. They never had anything like intraspecies warfare in their history, and they really have trouble understanding it in us."
"So they just offer a ride to anyone who asks, is that it?" Daren said.
"That's about it," Vic said.
"You really think Earth is going to get blown away?" Daren asked. He wore a faint smile.
"I don't see what can stop it," Dev said. "The same thing is happening there that happened at Alya. Or the Gr'tak world."
"That should solve the Confederation's problems with the Empire, at any rate, huh?"
"It's a damned high price to pay," Katya said sharply. "My God, Dev. there's got to be something! What about the Overmind?"
"I've tried," Dev said. "I've tried to reach it. I'm pretty sure it's there. I can sense . . . something, something very large, very powerful, but it's way down deep and completely nonresponsive, near as I can tell."
"Maybe all you're sensing is the potential of the thing," Taki said.
"Sure," Daren added. "It'll wake up when Nakamura's Number of humans link in."
"Maybe." Dev wasn't convinced of that at all. For one thing, he was pretty sure that there'd been something like Nakamura's Number of people linked in during the time he'd been back in the Solar System. The quickening pace of the communications crisscrossing back and forth on the Net suggested vast numbers of humanity linking in from every system in the Shichiju.
Still, when the Overmind had awakened during the Battle of Nova Aquila, Dev had received an unexpected and stunning look into the network's mind and experienced some small part of its power, scope, and reach. Nakamura's Number, a specific number of nodal interconnections and linkages that defined a specific "critical mass" of complexity above which a transcendental change took place, was more flexible as a concept, he knew now, than its mathematical nature might suggest. That number could have been changed by a factor of ten either way and it might not have affected the outcome . . . or the outcome could have been completely different. Humans had a long way to go in their understanding of what mind and consciousness were, and their stubborn reliance on numbers and rigid categories still gave them comfort in the face of the unknown.
"I don't think we can rely on the Overmind," Dev continued after a moment. "It's more like a natural force, a hurricane spawned by warm oceans and tropical weather patterns, than an ally."
"We haven't even been able to verify its existence," Taki put in, "save as a purely subjective phenomenon during the fight at Nova Aquila."
"Something took out the Web Alphas," Kara replied, referring to the planetoid-sized machine-ships the Web had used to coordinate their massive fleet's actions. "It wasn't our Combined Fleet that did it, that's for sure."
"The Overmind is real," Dev said. "It was then. It is now."
"Sure," Daren said with a grin. "But how real are you?"
The statement, Dev thought, had been intended as a joke, but it hurt nonetheless. He was surprised at how much it hurt.
"Unless we can find a way to stop the Web assault, Earth's sun will go nova in a few more days," he said with a hard curtness to the words. "We can assume that the Web will continue to search for human-occupied systems and destroy those as well."
"How the hell did it find Earth?" Vic wanted to know.
Dev sighed. "Ultimately, of course, that was my fault," he said. He'd been the one who'd first probed the Aquilan Stargate with a downloaded copy of himself . . . and that copy, together with everything he'd known, had been lost to the Web in the Galactic Core.
"But we countered that," Kara said. "Operation Shell Game."
"Obviously they saw through that," Dev replied. "I don't know how. For all we know, they were able to separate fact from fiction from the beginning, just because they're the ones who created the Naga in the first place, and know how they work better than we do."
"If that's true," Katya said gently, "I don't think they w
ould have waited two years before attacking Earth. Shell Game bought us time. It just would have been nice if it had bought us more time. Like maybe a century or three."
"Most likely," Vic said, "they ran some sort of a program on all of the information they picked up from our probes, comparing that data with what they knew about the Galaxy already. The information we downloaded into the Naga fragments wasn't all that complete. It couldn't be. Maybe they were able to pick up a difference in, well, in the texture of the information. Or there were little mistakes in star positions or alignments that we didn't catch."
"It's also possible they analyzed our EM shell," Taki pointed out. "Man's EM shell, I mean. It's got a radius of, what? Six hundred light years now. That's halfway to Nova Aquila already. And that shell is centered on Sol, because none of the colonies, even the oldest, like Chiron and New Earth, have been broadcasting on electromagnetic frequencies for anything near that long. All of their radio bubbles are submerged inside Earth's. If the Web has listening posts or another stargate closer to the Shichiju, within six light centuries of Earth, they could figure out where we were just for that."
"That's right!" Katya said. She looked at Dev's virtual image. "That's very right! I don't think anything else would explain how they could pinpoint Earth's solar system so precisely."
Dev rolled the idea about in his thoughts for a moment. He'd not considered that possibility, assuming, as he had, that his inadvertent first contact with the Web had been what had given the game away in the first place. "In the long run," he said slowly, "it doesn't really matter how they found Earth, does it? They have. We've been afraid that they would for two years now, ever since they found the Alyan worlds and destroyed them."
And that, he realized, was a part of his own pain. The DalRiss had lost their homeworld and its nearby colony as a direct result of that catastrophic first meeting, and he'd long felt guilty about the fact, even though the DalRiss themselves, though jolted by the experience, seemed to have accepted it as yet another step in their mysterious Dance of Life.
Their outlook on events, on such outwardly simple matters as cause and effect, was markedly different from that of humans.
"One way or another," he continued with only the slightest of pauses, "they've found Sol. And if we don't do something damned fast, we're going to lose Earth the same way the DalRiss and the Gr'tak lost their worlds." He gave Daren a hard look. "Believe me, son. That loss is going to hit us gokking hard."
Katya closed her eyes. "Everything we've fought for. Wiped away."
Taki shook her head. "Independence from the Empire's not such a big deal when we start talking about survival as a species."
"Well, damn it," Kara said, her fist clenched and raised above her lap with a small, defiant jerk. "I'm not ready to surrender to the Impies yet. Let's just see what happens, okay?"
"There doesn't seem to be a lot else we can do," Dev agreed.
Certainly, there was little more to be said. Dev took his leave of the others, then repeated his earlier electronic passage from 26 Draconis to Sol.
Five hours had passed since he'd been there before, and the forces still had not come together. Space battles, by virtue of the incredible distances involved, tended to be long, drawn-out affairs of maneuver capped by a few seconds of stark, extremely destructive violence. The Web swarms—there were now clearly three separate clouds on slightly divergent courses—had the potentially disastrous advantage. Able to accelerate at hundreds of gravities, they could achieve velocities of thousands of kilometers per second in a space of hours or even minutes; the Imperial ships, limited both by engineering and by the frailties of the flesh and blood they carried, could not push much higher than five Gs for the smaller vessels, three for the larger. Once the ryus were close enough to disgorge their squadrons of warflyers, of course, they would win back some of the difference, though not all. Manned warflyers could manage perhaps ten Gs before their pilots blacked out, and teleoperated flyers didn't need to restrict themselves to the limitations of human pilots. Even so, the best and most powerful flyer could not pull much more than forty to fifty Gs and would be at a significant disadvantage when facing the Web machines.
With their vast speed, the Web machines had closed much of the gap between where they'd entered the Solar System and the current position of Battlegroup Ida-Ten. Kurebayashi's squadron had continued accelerating out-system until it was clear that the Web cloud's velocity would swiftly close the dwindling distance between them, then take the cloud sweeping past the Imperial ships and on into the inner system. The Imperial vessels had spun end over end, then, and began decelerating hard at three Gs.
Dev had just arrived at the Hachiman facility when I2C-relayed images and information began flooding back down the communications lines from Kurebayashi's squadron, carrying details of vector, speed, and weapons readiness. The divergence between the three separate Web groups was no more than a few thousand kilometers, if that, but a projection of their separate courses suggested that one was heading for Earth, a second toward Kasei—old Mars—and the third toward the Sun.
Dev wondered about the three-part assault. At the DalRiss homeworld, there'd been two inhabited planets but they'd orbited two different stars in the widely spaced Alyan double system. The Gr'tak home star was also a double, but more closely spaced; only one world in that system had been inhabited, if you didn't count the artificial worlds built within hollowed-out planetoids.
In Man's home system, however, three worlds were heavily populated, Earth, Kasei, and Luna . . . and the Lunar population could be considered an extrapolation of the space-dwelling community in near-Earth space, the tens of millions of people living in the synchorbitals or in space colonies in extended Earth orbit or at the various LaGrange points. Though there were countless other settlements throughout the Solar System—on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, on and within hundreds of the drifting chunks of rock in the Asteroid Belt, on Mercury, in Venus orbit, in extended solar orbits—the Web had apparently zeroed in on the two largest concentrations of human population in the system, Earth-Lunar space, and Kasei, which had a permanent population of some hundreds of millions of people, as well as extensive military bases and facilities.
The strategy made Dev wonder. Were the Webbers really going after the two largest population centers? Or—as seemed likely from much of what he'd sensed in Web strategies before, and from what he'd learned from the Gr'tak—was the Web possibly unaware of most human activity? Could they be focusing on Kasei and Earth because those were the two strongest sources of EM radiation, or because they were the obvious primary nodes in the Solar System's far-flung computer net, or because they had the most ship activity in near space and low orbit?
Could that selective blindness of the Web be used? Dev wondered if, rather than trying to wake the Overmind up, they should be trying to shut down all EM and computer/communications/control activity on and around Earth to, in effect, make Earth invisible to the alien mind.
He dismissed the idea almost at once. Earth's real problem was not that it was visible to the Web, but the fact that Earth's sun was visible to them; once Sol went nova, it wouldn't matter much whether the Web could see the Earth or not.
Again, he tried to summon the Overmind, wondering what set of circumstances or conditions there might have been at Nova Aquila that had brought the meta-intelligence to life then that was missing now. Something was happening there; he could feel the Overmind's mental focus, the way it was studying . . . something, but he was no more able to communicate with it directly than an ant might have been able to communicate with the human over whose shoe it was walking. The Overmind seemed distant and preoccupied, totally involved with some other problem completely beyond Dev's ken.
In deep space, out well above the plane of the far reaches of the Asteroid Belt, the Ida-Ten Squadron was in range of the nearest elements of the Earthbound cloud. The relative velocities of the Web clouds and the Imperial squadron were still high, on the order of nearly two t
housand kilometers per second, but the AIs aboard the human warships had factored the speed difference into their fire-control equations and determined the best instant to commence the final part of the deadly dance.
Tennoryu opened the engagement, loosing a cloud of high-velocity missiles tipped with thermonuclear warheads. Earlier battles with the Web had demonstrated that nukes were among the most effective weapons for dealing with Web mass-attack tactics. Lasers, particle beams, and other beam weapons could vaporize or disable Webbers quickly as they slashed through clouds of massed, oncoming machines, but a twenty- or fifty-megaton thermonuclear device, detonating in the heart of a Web attack cloud, could reduce tens of thousands of them to vapor in a literal flash of star-hot plasma and cripple thousands more. Webbers appeared impervious to electromagnetic pulses and radiation; given the environment they must have spawned in, at the Galaxy's Core, that was only to be expected.
Minutes after the first launch, warheads began detonating within the Web cloud, savage, death-silent strobings of actinic light ballooning against the darkness and swiftly fading into fast-cooling invisibility. At the same time, the ryucarriers, Soryu and Tennoryu, began launching their warflyers. Each warship carried a complement of several hundred warflyers; it seemed a pitifully inadequate shield to throw up against such awesome power.
The Web attackers, for their part, neither swerved nor slowed. They continued approaching, the gentle drift of individual members of the cloud slowly filling in the gaps torn in their ranks by the detonating nukes. For the first time, Web weapons other than the nano-D of the smallest units were unlimbered and fired. Lasers flicked across the intervening space, touching the dark expanse of the dragonships' hulls, slashing across duralloy and nanoflage in ragged flares of searing light. A light cruiser, pinned in a deadly crossplay of high-energy lasers, writhed in an apparent agony as her midsection flared up with the heat and the light of a small sun. Secondary explosions from overheated slush-H reaction mass tanks ripped out her heart and snapped her spine; in another moment, the two surviving halves of the ship drifted apart, enmeshed now in an expanding cloud of sparkling vapor, ice crystals, and debris.