by Ian Douglas
But the major attack was developing in space, around the synchorbital facilities 36,000 kilometers above Earth's equator. Through his far-flung electronic sensors, Dev watched several hundred large Web kikai—the biggest were nearly the size of a small Imperial frigate and must have massed three thousand tons apiece—attack Earth's synchorbitals, the three separate clusters of habitats, factories, shipyards, and nanomanufactories that spread out along synchronous orbit at the top of each of Earth's three sky-els. Each facility possessed massed banks of lasers, particle beams, and missile launchers; the possibility of a Confederation attack on the seat of the Empire's government had long been a major concern of the Imperial Staff Command.
All three synchorbitals had taken heavy damage already, most from the laser sails and the smaller Web machines that had slipped past right under the guns of the trio of big ryu carriers and some hundreds of Imperial warflyers that served as the Empire's innermost protective bastion and had begun eating away at the facilities' outer hulls. The carriers Gingaryu, Shinryu, and Hoshiryu had maneuvered themselves close to each of the sky-el orbital complexes and deployed squadron after squadron of their best warflyers—mostly Ryusei- and Suisei-class fighters, though the larger and deadlier Shugekisha assault striders were in the fight as well.
Small warflyers were maneuvering among the girders and support beams of the synchorbitals, burning Web kickers off the structure wherever they could be found, and joining into squadron-sized assault units to hunt down and kill the larger enemy machines as they approached.
As Dev watched, a nuclear fireball blossomed, bringing a short, false dawn to the skies over South America; a Web machine had just turned itself into a small fusion warhead and detonated against the Quito Synchorbital, and wreckage was spreading out from the sky-el towertop in a glittering, sparkling haze.
Everywhere, the skies were sorcery unchained, an Armageddon of fire and death and destruction.
"I've got three big kickers," Kara reported over the command net. "Five thousand kilometers, directly ahead of me, and on a flat, all-out run. They're either headed for the Gauss or breaking through on a straight run for Sol."
She was accelerating hard now, with the sun a swollen brilliance directly ahead. Her Falcon's sensors were editing what she saw, of course, cutting down most of the light which, unfiltered, would have blinded her instantly. With computer processing and enhancement, even the granulation of the photosphere was visible, and she could make out the bright red arcs and geysers of the solar prominences rising above the raging star's limb.
Her targets, three unusually large Webbers each about the size of a 3,000-ton frigate, were deployed in a perfect equilateral triangle, each craft a half kilometer from its neighbors. These things tend to travel in clusters, she thought. I wonder if that's the key to their coordination program? If the Webbers operated as a group mind, they would need a way to communicate with one another and coordinate their actions. At Nova Aquila, the Alphas had been the coordinators. Here, though, the Web forces must be running their equivalent of control programs on multiple kickers, each, perhaps, serving as a node in a widely dispersed network. It couldn't be too dispersed, however, since too great a distance would introduce a nasty time lag due to speed-of-light limitations. That need to stick together, to maintain a close and tight line of sight, might be a clue to the way they were coordinating their efforts.
The analysis flashed through her mind in less time than it took to select one of the three targets and lock in her Devastator. A coded thought fired the weapon, and a portion of the flat, angular Web craft vanished in a puff of vapor and sun-flashing fragments. She fired again, and the beam ripped through the target's side halfway from stern to prow; as vapor exploded from the stricken craft, sending it tumbling wildly in the opposite direction, Kara shifted targets to one of the two remaining kickers, locking in and firing in a fast-paced succession of control thoughts. The second kicker exploded, fragments glowing white-hot as they spun through space. "Kilo!" she shouted, using the K-for-kill code current in warflyer ops. "That's two!"
She was pouring fire into the third target when a K-242 Starstreak with a micronuke warhead streaked in from Kara's left and detonated, the tiny matter-antimatter charge in its detonator generating the flash and the surplus of neutrons necessary to trigger a relatively small but precisely placed tenth-kiloton blast.
"Kilo!" Ran called over the tactical net. "That's three!"
"Two and a half," Kara said, correcting him with a laugh. It sounded harsh and a bit brittle to her ear, and she wondered if Ran could hear the strain in her mental voice. "Let's keep it straight!"
Ran's warstrider flashed past, a few hundred kilometers distant. Ahead now, a hundred thousand kilometers away, Gauss and Shralghal hung in space, keeping up a running, long-ranged sniping against the larger kickers, and awaiting either the battle's end or the announcement that an Achiever was ready to carry both vessels to the safety of another system.
Kara pulled her Falcon around, dropping into a gentle, sweeping turn that put her on Ran's tail.
"I think we've got 'em about licked," Ran told her. His excitement, his buoyant attitude, were infectious. "We've killed all the kickers over a meter or two in this cloud. From here on, it'll be a mop-up!"
The laser-driven nano gossamer streaked in so quickly that neither Kara nor Ran saw it coming. One moment, she was tucked in behind him, flying in close formation as they shaped a new vector out-system. The next, Ran's Falcon was an eye-searing splash of blinding light, a radiance that briefly outshone the huge and swollen sun. Her flyer hit the expanding debris cloud, which rattled off her armor like hail in a fierce-driving storm and jolted her Falcon like the detonation of a bomb.
"Ran!" His flyer was gone, disintegrated utterly by the high-kinetic impact of an object traveling at well over half the speed of light. It had been so sudden that she still couldn't completely register that it had happened. "Ran!"
"We're on it, Captain," a voice from Gauss said. "We're trying to revive him now."
Kara struggled for control, fighting down rage and horror and stark fear. Ran was okay. He had to be. He would wake up in a few moments back aboard the Gauss, disoriented, confused and dazed, perhaps, but still well. Still with his mind intact.
He had to. . . .
For the Dev-copy that had remained in the Solar System, the battle continued to unfold as a titanic, sprawling mosaic of countless pieces, slowly coming together as he manipulated the streams of data flowing from ten thousand separate sources. For a time, he'd tried to influence the battle at various points and from different nodes in the Net, but he'd given that up at last. The battle now was less a matter of strategy and tactics—or even of creative solutions to new threats—than it was a bloody and patient contest of numbers versus will. Hundreds of thousands—possibly millions—of Web kickers were now everywhere throughout near-Earth space, clustering most intensely at the major concentrations of human technology, the sky-els, the synchorbitals, and the big orbital facilities around Luna and at the Earth-Moon LaGrange points.
One unfolding drama, however, captured Dev's attention. The enormous ryu warflyer-carrier Hoshiryu, the Star Dragon, was moving slowly past the Singapore Synchorbital space docks, a massive, armor-hided leviathan nearly one kilometer long, with the needle-slim spires of weapons nacelles and sensory antennae stabbing forward like the thrusts of multiple bladed weapons.
Hoshiryu, Dev saw as he called up the data, had been positioned a few hundred kilometers out from Singapore Synchorbital, adding its considerable firepower and the warflyer squadrons stationed on-board to the already titanic missile and energy output from the synchorbital planetary defenses. Until the appearance of the Web clouds, the carrier had been in space dock for routine maintenance and repairs. She was operational, but her K-T drives were off-line and she would be limited to normal-space operations for the duration; Hoshiryu would win in her coming battle . . . or die.
Dev's attention was attracted to the huge d
ragonship seconds after a long, needle-like Webber flashed in with drives full-on. Measuring perhaps fifty meters from prow to stern and massing less than three hundred tons, it was a sliver compared with the ponderous mass of the dragonship, but it was traveling at something like two hundred kilometers per second. It streaked in out of the fire and the blackness so fast that the carrier's defensive beams and point-defense turrets missed entirely . . . or had time only to caress its outer layers of armor. It struck the Hoshiryu amidships, burying itself in the bigger ship's flank like an old-time harpoon plunging into the side of a whale.
Then it detonated, a staggering release of kinetic energy that sent ripples cascading along the ryu's length. The big ship shuddered, yawing hard to port, as glowing-hot fragments spilled from the burning rent in its side.
Within seconds, three more Webbers flashed in, angling toward the stricken Imperial giant. One vanished in a lightning-flash of raw energy, trapped in a crossfire from ryu and synchorbital, but the other two plunged past the expanding shell of gas and debris and pierced the grievously wounded ryu forward of her main spin-grav module, and aft, near the clustered slush-H storage tanks.
Damn! Dev thought with growing horror. They're using the ryu for a suicide bombing target! . . .
Hoshiryu was out of control now. Huge gaps showed in her hull where armor plates had been eaten or blown away, and a dozen craters pocked her hull, some still glowing red-hot from the energies that had been loosed there. Much of the aft end had been literally melted away in the starcore heat of that fusion blast.
Hoshiryu was falling. . . .
Dev felt a sudden, sick premonition. Focusing his long-range gaze on the great dragonship, he accessed Hachiman's considerable skill in the math of orbital mechanics, calculating the ryu carrier's vector. As he watched, lines drew themselves across his vision, diagramming to the laws of mathematics and physics what intuition had already told him.
Hoshiryu was falling toward Singapore Synchorbital at several kilometers per second.
A ryu-class carrier measured nearly a kilometer in length and massed almost two million tons. Some of that tonnage had burned away in the fusion flame, certainly, but only a fraction of the whole was gone. One point eight million tons moving at . . . make it four kilometers per second. The monster ship possessed potential energy of something like 1.4 to the 1016 joules, and there was no way in heaven or on Earth to stop it from happening.
A barrage of missiles leaped out from the Synchorbital's planetary defense bays, targeting now not Web machines but that huge, deadly hulk falling toward the delicate traceries of the spaceport. Someone down there was thinking fast . . . but it wasn't enough, not nearly enough by far.
Dev felt a small, inward twist at the irony. He'd recently reviewed the new upgrades in security at Tenno Kyuden; the TJK, the Imperial Security Force, had been almost frantic over the possibility that the Imperial Palace or Navy headquarters might be penetrated by Confederation agents as easily as had been the planetary defense net on Kasei.
How did you provide security against a falling skyscraper of a starship?
Hoshiryu struck stern first, a glancing blow, actually, that brushed the struts and cross-beam supports aside like a broom slashing through cobwebs. A spacedock for smaller craft was in line next; the incoming ship smashed through hab modules and support girders and bay installation and scarcely even slowed.
Something exploded. The detonation expanded, a fireball of intense, sun-brilliant heat and light, engulfing part of the ryu carrier and burning through the heart of the synchorbital.
Dev was able to just glimpse the huge, turning wheel of the Imperial Palace itself before the bow of the Hoshiryu pivoted around, smashed through the wheel's rim, and scattered the rest in a whirling explosion of wildly spinning pieces.
For a long moment, it seemed as though the battle had paused . . . near Earth, at any rate, where Imperial naval defenders by the tens of thousands must have been staring in stark horror at the destruction of the very symbol of the life and strength of their empire. The communications networks were suddenly silent, as silent as death; there was nothing to be said, nothing even to be shared but the silent agony of that moment.
Still moving, the hulk of the shattered Hoshiryu kept falling, accelerating slowly under the drag of Earth's gravity. In another few hours, it would have fallen across the gulf between the synchorbital and Earth, tumbling, burning as it hit Earth's atmosphere. It was certain to cause nightmare devastation when it struck.
Dev felt a momentary blurring of self and of personality that left him slightly dizzy, and adrift in space and time. He'd played a similar disaster through his mind so many times in the past that he felt as though he'd been here before. His father . . . God . . . his father. . . .
Michal Cameron, Dev's father, had many years before been one of the few gaijin to be given command in the Imperial Navy. He'd been skippering the Imperial destroyer Hatakaze, at the final battle for Chien IV, a Manchurian-colonized world known as Lung Chi, forty-five light years from Earth. The enemy had been the Naga, back in the days before peaceful contact had been established, when the Naga had been known instead as Xenophobes. Cameron had been assigned to protect the fleet of refugee ships at Lung Synchorbital, high atop the sky-el, when the Naga had reached the sky-el's base and begun swarming up from the planet's equator, molecularly transforming the tower's carbon-weave structure as they raced into the sky.
Half a million colonists remained on the surface, awaiting their turn to evacuate up the tower. At synchorbit was the evacuation fleet—the presumed target of the Naga attack. Cameron had decided that his first duty was to protect the fleet . . . and to keep the Xenophobes from capturing ships that they might be able to use to spread their infection to other worlds of the Shichiju. He'd launched a single Starhawk missile with a twenty-kiloton warhead, targeting the sky-el tower at the two-thousand-kilometer mark, just ahead of the advancing wave of transformation. He'd teleoped the missile himself, so that no one else would have to live with the decision he'd been forced to make.
The detonation had severed the tower, sending the upper span, thousands of kilometers in length, whiplashing out into space, while the lower part fragmented and crashed back to the surface in a blazing, fiery reentry. Half a million Manchurians had died, either in the catastrophic collapse of the sky-el, or later, as the Xenophobes devoured them. Michal Cameron had been court-martialed and disgraced; he'd committed seppuku shortly after.
The incident had burned itself into Dev's mind long before; it was a scar he'd carried for years, a scar that had helped drive him eventually to betray the Empire, to join the revolution fighting for Confederation independence. As much as anything else, the death of Dev's father—and what he'd done at Lung Chi—had made Dev what he was now.
And as the Imperial naval carrier Hoshiryu fell toward Earth, Dev knew he was seeing a replay of that incident . . . not in an exact repetition of events, of course, but in spirit. The mathematics of the ryu were clear and concise. Hoshiryu was not in orbit; her vector was almost directly toward the planet. She would continue to fall, more or less paralleling the vertical sky-stab of the Singapore space elevator. So large a ship would not burn appreciably in the atmosphere before it reached the surface. It would strike somewhere within a few hundred kilometers of Singapore—and when it struck it would liberate those fourteen million billion joules of energy in an explosion that would be vaster and more devastating by far than anything to have struck the planet since the fall of the dinosaur killer sixty-five million years before.
Earth would not die; the dinosaur killer had liberated energies at least a hundredfold greater. But the blast might well wreck the planet's fragile ecosystem. The Shockwave would almost certainly rip the Singapore sky-el out of the sky, and its fall across half of the planet would add to the untold destruction and death that would visit Dev's home-world.
He'd felt nothing for the planet for a long time, no emotion, no sorrow for having left . . . but h
e couldn't sit back and let such a titanic disaster, death on such a nightmare scale, take place.
But how in the name of Chaos could an electronic ghost stop the fall of almost two million tons of inert starship?
There might be a way. Swiftly, Dev shifted himself to the Hachiman communications center, then routed himself through an open I2C tactical link to the communications center aboard the Hoshiryu. The ship's bridge, he could tell from the damage-control messages playing through the bridge readouts, was open to space, and air was venting from a dozen ruptures. There were still people alive; ryus carried crews numbering several thousand, and only a few hundred had actually been killed by the kicker strikes. He could sense the life pods launching as he searched for the access codes he needed.
The Hoshiryu gave a violent lurch, and Dev sensed the tremor of major explosions. He would have to hurry.
A secondary data feed trunk let him route through to main engineering. The carrier's power tap was still running. What Dev needed to do was find the computer code that would let him access the QPT containment fields and feedback controls.
Starships required colossal amounts of energy, far more than could be provided by any but the very largest fusion power plants. The Quantum Power Tap, first demonstrated by Nihonjin physicists in the mid-twenty-first century, used paired, mini-black holes to draw so-called "virtual energy," energy arising spontaneously from hard vacuum through the workings of quantum physics. The energy that could be liberated from a small volume of "empty space" was large indeed; most physicists still disagreed on the exact magnitude, but it was energy enough to destroy a world easily.
. . . or a starship, even one as large as Hoshiryu.