Warstrider: Symbionts (Warstrider Series, Book Four)

by Ian Douglas

She allowed him to lead her from the entry deck, taking an elevator to Deck Three and the main cafeteria. The room, somewhat cramped but opened up by a viewall looking into space, was not very crowded at this hour, though Katya recognized several Confed naval officers at one of the tables. She wished she could chat with them, but after getting her tray—the meal that day was a nano-grown synthetic resembling sashimi—she followed Sinclair back to another table.

  Japanese food, especially any involving even artificial raw fish, was not Katya's favorite. The hab environmental systems, however, had been programmed years ago by the Imperials who'd set up the Heraklean watch station, and in the months since the Confederation had moved in there'd been neither time nor personnel to reprogram the manufactories. She set her tray down opposite Sinclair, who stood for her with his hand over his heart in an almost courtly display of New American etiquette.

  Katya had been dreading this meeting, and she was ashamed of the fact. Travis Ewell Sinclair was indisputably brilliant, and scarcely the monster she somehow wanted him to be. The necessities of leadership forced hard choices, she knew, choices not always popular with the people who had to carry them out. The decision to abandon New America in the face of an invasion had been such a choice, as had been the decision to leave behind so many of the men and women who'd been fighting at Katya's side. She understood the military necessity of such command decisions very well. She couldn't be a colonel in the Confederation's ground forces without that understanding.

  But neither could she carry out her orders without experiencing a wrenching change in her feelings for the man who'd given them.

  "I'm glad you could come, Katya," Sinclair said, taking his seat. He smiled across the table at her. "I . . . have news."

  She'd been expecting an official chewing out. The unexpected words startled her and then, as their meaning sank in, Katya's hopes leaped. "Dev?"

  Sinclair ran one hand through his hair, which he wore unstylishly long. His hair and beard were dark, but shot through with streaks of gray. "Yes. Captain Cameron's in-system again, and with another prize. I just got word as they were pulling me out of that simulation." He gave her a rueful smile. "You pack quite a punch, young lady. Sometime, you'll have to tell me what the CO of the 1st Rangers was doing in my rear, with eight warstriders!"

  "Destroying your mobile artillery, General. Wasn't that obvious? What's Dev's ETA?"

  "He should be docking with Rogue in another ten hours."

  "Wonderful! How . . . how is he?"

  "Seems fine," Sinclair replied. "I ViRcommed with him about an hour ago, while you were on the way up. He said to give you his love."

  Katya smiled at that. "Thank you, sir. For telling me."

  "That's not why I asked you to come up here."

  "Of course not." Here it comes, she thought.

  "The last prize that Captain Cameron took had some rather momentous data squirreled away in its shipboard memory."

  "Yes?" That apparent swerve from the topic at hand caught her interest. The most important weapon in any war was information—intelligence, in the military lexicon—and a primary source was the data banks of enemy AIs.

  "It seems that the ship, an independent trader called the Kasuga Maru, was part of a supply convoy to the Imperial garrison on Alya A-VI a few months ago. While they were in orbit, they recorded a number of radio transmissions between the surface and the Imperial squadron. We're not entirely sure what's happening out there, but it sounds as though the DalRiss have attacked an Imperial ground base."

  "Attacked it! Why?"

  "We don't know. But if the report is true, it puts a new and higher priority on Operation Farstar."

  Katya paused, the chopsticks holding a bit of artificial raw fish hovering between a dish of fiery-hot mustard and her mouth. Slowly, she returned the morsel to the plate and set the chopsticks down. Her hunger was forgotten, as was her dislike for Sinclair.

  "I'd say it's about goddamned time."

  "You still want to be a part of it?"

  "Of course. If anything's going to end this damned war, Farstar is it."

  "I agree. And your feelings about Dev Cameron going along?"

  She had to think about how to answer that one, though she knew what her gut feelings said. "It'll be good to have him along, of course. For a number of reasons." And not just because this would be a long, long trip, and she loved him and hated the idea of perhaps another year away from his side. "I suspect that the real question is how he feels about it, though. And how you plan to handle . . . handle it while he's gone. It wouldn't do to leave Herakles defenseless while we're off gallivanting with the DalRiss."

  "Oh, we won't be defenseless. Dev's not the only one who can Xenolink. But there has been, ah, speculation about how well he's recovered after his experience. I was wondering how you felt about Dev linking with you on this—"

  "You were sure enough of Dev to let him take Eagle out commerce raiding." Her reply was harsher than she'd intended. "Why should this be any different?"

  "Because you'll be dealing with the DalRiss. And you may well be linking with a Naga again. With another Naga, the one at Alya B. The strangeness factor's going to be something awful. I want to know that you can handle it. And that you think he can."

  "If Dev Cameron can't handle it," Katya said quietly, "nobody can!"

  "That," Sinclair said with a small grin, "is exactly what I wanted to hear."

  And maybe it'll be good to get away from here, Katya told herself. Just me and Dev and a few thousand warstriders. Like old times!

  She wondered what Dev was going to say when he heard. Most of the final plans for Farstar had been put together after he'd left. She imagined, though, that he would be pleased. He'd not been at all happy with the possibility of Xenolinking again, not after what had happened during the Imperial assault on Herakles.

  A long diplomatic mission to a people still largely incomprehensible to humans might be exactly what he needed.

  Chapter 6

  Cephlink technology extends human productivity by reducing the time necessary to achieve expertise.

  Cephlink technology increases personal stress levels by reducing the time necessary to acquire physical experience.

  —Fielding's First and Second Laws

  Man and His Works

  Dr. Karl Gunther Fielding

  C.E. 2448

  Eagle rendezvoused with the Rogue's hub fifteen hours after dropping out of K-T space. The Kasuga Maru, with her lower acceleration, would not arrive in Heraklean orbit for some days yet, but the treasure trove discovered in her AI by her prize crew during the long passage home had been transferred to a high-density molecular datachip, which Dev was now hand-carrying to the Confederation AI technicians on the Rogue.

  Eagle was too large to dock directly with the slow-turning fragment of sky-el. Instead, she took up a parking orbit with the rest of the tiny Confederation fleet a few hundred kilometers clear of the segment's rotational hub. There were perhaps thirty vessels in orbit now, mostly freighters, transports, and small escort vessels, frigates and corvettes. Standing out among the others was the sleek, planoform liner Transluxus, formerly a Star Lines passenger ship, now the rather luxuriously appointed transportation for the Confederation Congress. She hung ten kilometers off, agleam in the golden light of Mu Herculis, with only a small service and maintenance crew aboard her.

  After seeing to Eagle and the establishment of orbital routine—and consulting with Lieutenant Canady about watch schedules and liberty aboard the Rogue—Dev ferried across in a work shuttle. Docking at the hub, he transferred to a rider pod, a small capsule that tapped the centrifugal force created by the sky-el's spin and slid "down" a magnetic rail to the hab modules at the half-G level.

  The hab's travel concourse was a large and comfortably furnished compartment, but one made crowded by people waiting for pods to or from other parts of the sky-el, or who, like Dev, were newly arrived. The far bulkhead created the illusion of roominess, with its curved
viewall set to display a panorama of space dominated by the half sphere of Herakles.

  Sinclair and part of his personal staff were waiting for Dev as he broke free of the crowd by the travel pod locks. The New American general and political philosopher was the only man present in civilian clothes, including a formal, white half-cape. The rest wore military uniforms, two-toned gray like Dev's own bodysuit for navy, two-toned brown for army. Within both the military and the government of the young Confederation, such niceties as details of dress uniforms were still in a state of flux. Even something as basic as ranks were still confused, with the rebels still in the process of switching from the Nihongo system favored by the Hegemony to one based on the old, pre-Hegemony systems. Though designs could easily be changed simply by reprogramming the nano that manufactured such articles as bodysuits and rank insignia, it was actually difficult to standardize such things, given the sheer size and dispersion of the forces involved, especially under the press of more urgent business. Dev noted with mild amusement that despite the impressive show of ceremony, most of the uniforms and the rank and service insignia at their collars didn't match, and one navy captain in Sinclair's entourage wore the dress whites of Hegemony service, with a taisa's three chrysanthemum pips at his collar. That was understandable, of course. Most of the Confederation's naval personnel had once served with the Hegemony navy.

  The display tended to reinforce the image of the Confederation military as something of a patchwork of cultures and organizations and rugged individualists. That anything was ever decided on, Dev thought, was nothing less than miraculous.

  "Permission to come aboard," Dev said, rendering the crisp Hegemony naval salute.

  "Granted," General Darwin Smith, the senior man in uniform, replied.

  "Welcome back, Captain," Sinclair added.

  "Good to be back, sir. Here's the baby." He handed the datachip, swaddled carefully within its transport case, to Sinclair, who passed it on to one of his officers. Frozen within the chip's crystalline lattice was a tiny galaxy of charges representing some trillions of bytes of data lifted from Kasuga Maru's data banks. Dev hadn't had the time to go through more than a tiny fraction of that information yet—but he knew that much of it was AI encoding for several ViRcom exchanges accidentally intercepted by the Kasuga Maru's communications suite and routinely filed. If the TJK—the Taikokuno Johokyoku, or Imperial Intelligence Bureau—had learned that an independent merchant ship had acquired such singular intelligence . . .

  "Thank you, Captain," Sinclair said. "If what you've already told me about this data is true, you may well have given us the ammunition we need to shake Farstar loose in Congress."

  "I hope so, sir. If there's any way at all to get the DalRiss on our side, we've got to explore it. No matter what."

  "The Congress," General Smith muttered, "is as incompetent now as it was before we left New America. I still think we should do what's right, not sit around waiting for idiot delegates to get off their asses. Uh, present company excepted, of course." Sinclair still held his position as a congressional delegate from New America.

  "Military rule, Darwin?" Sinclair asked the man mildly.

  Smith considered the question, then curtly nodded. "If we have to, sir, yes. Desperate times require desperate measures."

  "That 'desperate times' line has been used before in history, General," Dev suggested quietly. "Usually to justify dictatorship."

  "We will not win this war by becoming the very monster we're fighting against," Sinclair said. "We will observe the forms of democracy, even if the substance is meaningless as yet. Congress, even an ad hoc one such as this, is the only thing that gives us legitimacy with the people we want to join us. Those 'idiot delegates,' as you put it, are the future of this Confederation."

  "Well, at least," Admiral Sigismun Halleck said, laughing, "we don't have as many of the sons of bitches to contend with now."

  The Confederation Congress was considerably reduced in numbers now, over a year since it had first assembled in Jefferson, the capital of New America. When Congress had fled New America just ahead of the Imperial landings, most of the delegates who'd opposed independence for the Confederation had stayed behind. Those who'd escaped to Herakles had, for the most part, been those dedicated to a complete political break with the Terran Hegemony.

  But that didn't mean that all was harmonious among the remaining five-hundred–odd delegates to the Confederation Congress. Serious differences between several of the worlds continued to threaten the young government, the issue of freedom for gene-tailored people being among the most serious. The "genies" so vital to the economic strength of Rainbow were being championed by the abolitionist parties on Liberty, and the feud had spread to other worlds as well. The divisions had created enemies; battles for or against newly proposed plans had become political struggles that had little to do with whether or not those plans would help or hinder the Confederation, and everything to do with the foundations of personal power.

  Of particular concern to the Congress lately had been the deployment of the Confederation's tiny fleet of warships. Too small to stand up to an Imperial battle group, it had proven good so far for little more than commerce raiding . . . and then only if it didn't run up against serious opposition. Eagle was still the single largest warship in the Confederation's arsenal, and even a small Imperial squadron generally included two or three ships of Eagle's class as escorts for the larger cruisers and Ryu-carriers.

  While Travis Sinclair had been elected by Congress to the command of the Confederation military, he still had to answer to Congress for his decisions . . . and accept its recommendations when they were put to a vote. The rebel government was as divided over what to do with its fleet now as it was over the question of freedom for the genies. Some supported the idea of using it in the long-planned, long-argued Operation Farstar; others insisted that the fleet should be kept close to the Confederation capital. Many of the delegates were still undecided, and it was their vote that Sinclair hoped to win with the news from Alya A.

  "Is your crew taken care of, Captain?" Sinclair asked him.

  "Yes, sir. Commander Canady, my XO, is securing the ship. She'll be letting the first liberty section come across to the Rogue starting tonight."

  "That's fine. I'm afraid we still don't have much in the way of the amenities, either here or on the surface of Herakles. Things are still damned crowded up here, and a bit primitive down on the surface."

  "I think more than anything else, General, they just need to see something other than the inside of Eagle's bulkheads. And maybe eat something other than Nihon chow. I don't suppose? . . ."

  "Ah, I'm afraid the food prep programs are still serving up the finest in Japanese cuisine," Sinclair said. "The techs have been too busy keeping the power plant up and running and getting the weapons and deep space scanners on line to worry much about the menu."

  "In other words, Dev," a familiar voice said, "it's rice, vegetables, and fish for dinner again tonight."

  Turning, Dev saw the slender, dark-haired woman in military browns just entering the concourse lobby. "Katya!"

  "So you finally decided to come back, eh?" she said with a twinkle.

  "The colonel, here," Sinclair said gravely, "has been threatening to use her Rangers as a search party if you didn't come back to us soon. We're all relieved that you made it back." He paused, consulting an inner voice. "Well, we have about twelve hours before Congress is scheduled to reconvene, and I, for one, have to review this new information that the captain has brought us." He glanced from Dev to Katya and back again. "Will you two be able to attend the staff briefing afterward?"

  "Of course."

  "Yes, sir."

  "Good. I'll see you then. In the meantime, perhaps Katya will be good enough to show you to your quarters and get you settled in." He grinned at them. "I imagine you have some catching up to do."

  "Thank you, sir." With military personnel coming and going on extended missions from the Rogue,
quarters were assigned on a short-term and rotational basis, while personal effects were stored in a cargo module near the sky-el's hub.

  Dev turned to Katya as Sinclair and his entourage walked away. "Hello, stranger."

  "Hello, Dev. Welcome back. It's . . . awfully good to see you."

  "It's wonderful to see you." He glanced around the crowded concourse. "So . . . it looks like privacy is still at a premium."

  "It's worse than ever, Dev. The port and hab facilities down at New Argos are growing fast, but not fast enough to keep up with our growth. We've had almost eight thousand more people arrive in the past four months, from all across the Shichiju. The word's spreading, Dev. The whole Frontier wants independence."

  "Which leaves us looking for a place to get reacquainted." He glanced around the concourse. The sky-el hab had originally been designed as a roomy outpost for a staff of, at most, a hundred Imperial observers and Sekkodan scouts. Now, with the facility serving both as government center for the Confederation and as headquarters for the CONMILCOM, the Confederation Military Command, it had a permanent population of over seven hundred and a transient population of perhaps a thousand more. Many people lived aboard the various transports in orbit, but they had to rotate between shipboard assignments and the spin-gravity habs of the sky-el in order to stay fit and healthy. Too long a stretch of zero G made the strongest man a helpless cripple.

  Most of the growing population, of course, lived on the surface. "No time to go down to Herakles, I suppose," Dev said, a little wistfully.

  "Not with us as short on ascraft transport as we've been. We wouldn't make it back for at least a day or two. I think we'd better settle for a couple of com modules."

  "Well, lovely lady, you provide the modules," Dev said, smiling. He tapped the side of his head with his forefinger. "And I'll provide the place. Lead on!"

  Later, Dev and Katya shared a virtual reality, their bodies unfelt within separate ViRcom modules, their minds linked by software. Waves crashed along a sandy beach; the sun, westering, touched the ocean with gold and sparkling white, as sea gulls wheeled in an afternoon sky. Nearby, white foam chased skittering clusters of sandpipers up and down the sand. Dev wasn't even sure if the reality behind the scene existed anymore, so polluted had most of Earth's inshore waters been for at least the past five centuries.