Warstrider: Symbionts (Warstrider Series, Book Four)

by Ian Douglas

  Despite the intense crowding aboard any military warship, it was actually difficult to do otherwise. It had always required an effort of will for Dev to communicate with other people on any level deeper than polite greeting or shipboard routine. In fact, Eagle's close quarters tended to increase Dev's isolation, as week followed week in the unending monotony of the K-T Plenum. Most military personnel, through both their Hegemony training and experience, tended to adopt an almost Nihonjin sense of personal space, a privacy of the mind in a place where physical privacy was hard to come by, and Dev was no exception. Imperials referred to it as naibuno sekai, the inner world, and the walls it raised were seemingly as impenetrable as duralloy sheathing. A man and woman could be furiously coupling against a bulkhead in the main passageway and others would pass them by, not staring, not even seeing, a selective blindness that allowed crew personnel to maintain their sanity as day followed day in unending and unchanging routine.

  Starships were by their nature crowded. Eagle was a giant, 395 meters long and massing eighty-four thousand tons, but the vast majority of her bulk was taken up by power plant, drives, and reaction mass tankage; four hundred men and women lived in her two rotating habs, in quarters that might have comfortably accommodated fifty.

  The best therapy for the pressures induced by a long K-T passage, of course, was the time rationed to each person for access to a ViRcom module. There, for an hour or two every other day, dreams became reality, and the stinking, overheated, overcrowded monotony of shipboard life could be forgotten for a time within the virtual reality of the dreamer's choosing. Dev spent much of his time in multiple linkages with members of his staff, of course, just in pursuit of his day-to-day routine of conferences and planning sessions, but interaction there was impersonal and professional. He could count most of Eagle's officers as friends, including both Lara Anders, her senior pilot, and Lisa Canady, her new skipper, but in an unwritten law extending back to an era when wooden ships sailed liquid seas, no commanding officer could afford friendships, platonic or otherwise, that might hamper his ability to command.

  So despite the crowding, Dev felt alone . . . and lonely. His sense of isolation had steadily increased since his hasty departure from Herakles. He was having trouble reading those he talked to, he often missed the undercurrent of emotion and body language that was the foundation for any communication deeper than "hello." Virtual reality linkages made things so easy—remote, detached, and sanitary—that they were infinitely preferable to meetings face-to-face.

  He missed Katya, of course, missed her more, if possible, than he had during their last separation, but she was where a regimental commander was supposed to be during a transit, with her troops aboard their ship. She was making the passage aboard the transport Vindemiatrix and would not be shifting to Eagle until after they arrived at their destination.

  In any case, after the disastrous nightmare in the cargo bay of the docked shuttle, he scarcely dared to open himself to anyone. Command granted him a privacy that he appreciated now.

  The AI continued to give him a technomegalomania rating of point four. He was convinced now that there was something else wrong with him, something stemming from the Xenolink. He felt torn—dreading the power that had been his during the Xenolink on one hand, craving the sense of power and completion and wholeness that was his while linked with a ship's AI on the other. At first, he couldn't relate those two seemingly opposite drives in his mind, not until he began questioning whether or not the comforting embrace of a ship's AI might not be, in some small way, at least, a substitute for the far vaster and more sweeping transformation of mind and body that had been his, briefly, on Herakles.

  Was he going mad? Could he know if he was going mad? There were no answers, no promises of answers. All he had was the growing desire, the need to link again with Eagle's AI and take the ship into combat.

  Linked, he felt complete. When unjacked, an ordinary man, he tended to avoid the other members of Eagle's crew, withdrawing into the naibuno sekai if he could not withdraw from them in the real world. His status as the commodore in command of Farstar helped maintain that separation, a certain measure of personal isolation that he found he now welcomed.

  He did remain available to those who needed to talk, of course. Many of the people aboard Eagle had wives, sweethearts, and family members still living on New America or on other worlds threatened by the Empire, and the enforced separations added to the pressure cooker atmosphere of shipboard life. Occasionally, when the pressure got too much, there would be a fight or some other infraction of the tightly woven web of rules and regulations by which every ship lived and died, and then he would officiate over a punishment mast. Sometimes, punishment consisted of forfeiture of recjacking time in the modules, but as time went on, forcing members of the crew to endure shipboard life without the temporary reprieve of virtual reality became counterproductive. Most often, fights between crew members were themselves resolved through ViRsimulation, with the combatants assuming fighter analogues for themselves or engaging in battle through simulated warstriders or flyers. Therapy, Dev found, could double as training, a means of keeping his people jacked in and hard, ready to meet whatever was waiting for them at Alya.

  Through all of this, Dev remained as aloof and as uninvolved as possible. He could not risk showing even a hint of favoritism, needing to be seen by all in the crew as both fair and impartial. At the same time, he found himself erecting higher and higher barriers against the other officers aboard, until by the end of the passage he was taking most of his meals alone in his quarters and talking to others only in the strict line of duty.

  Fifteen weeks after their departure from Mu Herculis, Eagle emerged into normal fourspace on the fringes of the Alya A system. Constellation, Rebel, and the corvettes Intrepid and Audacious were already there, having arrived on station several hours earlier. Passive scanning had detected the neutrino emissions of fifteen ships already in-system, twelve of them tucked in tight around Alya A-VI, the other three in transit to or from the planet. So far, there was no sign that the newcomers' arrival had been detected.

  The sun Alya A was a tiny, intensely brilliant disk set in a milky glow of zodiacal light, while its distant twin glowed more brightly than Venus seen from Earth. The Alyan suns were young as stars go; less than a billion years had passed since they'd emerged together from the nebula that had given them birth, and both nestled at the centers of vast accretion disks of planetoids, dust, and meteoric debris. Comets, too, were more common in these younger systems, and several glowed with pale, wispy delicacy, their tails aimed outward away from the sun.

  Dev, linked into Eagle's sensor suite, considered the vista of light-scattering dust and debris ringing Alya A. The speed with which life had attained intelligence here was astonishing; more astonishing still was the tenacious grip with which life clung to existence in a system where meteor and comet impacts were commonplace. Dev remembered watching the meteors visible as golden flashes against ShraRish's nightside during his previous visit three years before. Brenda Ortiz had told him during the voyage out that dinosaur-killer impacts—strikes as devastating as the one that had driven so many Terran species to extinction sixty-five million years earlier—probably occurred on ShraRish every few tens of thousands of years. Somehow, life on the DalRiss worlds had learned to survive the cosmic bombardment. Current theory suggested that the frequent impacts were partially responsible for the diversity and toughness of Alyan life; if radiation from those young, hot stars drove evolution in the system, the weeding-out of existing life by infalling planetoids and comets contributed to the cold discrimination of natural selection.

  The dust had also suggested a strategy, one that Dev had been working on in simulations throughout most of the long passage from Herakles. They had deliberately emerged within the outer fringes of the star's accretion disk, far enough out from ShraRish that the burst of energy released from the K-T plenum by their arrival should have gone unnoticed, as had the steady flux
of neutrinos from their fusion power plants. The debris fields sheltered them from radar and ladar detection from the planet, of course, and shielded their own infrared emissions.

  There, the tiny fleet waited for the arrival of the rest of the squadron. While fifth-generation K-T drives allowed ships to cross space at the rate of roughly a light year per day, the skill of the jackers, the unpredictable effects of currents within the godsea, or the pure, random bad luck of a malfunction could affect a ship's expected arrival time by days one way or the other—more if a power plant or drive breakdown left the ship helplessly adrift in the deeps between the stars.

  They could not afford to wait longer, however, even hidden within the outer edge of Alya A's accretion disk. The neutrinos released by a ship's fusion plant were not masked by interplanetary dust. The fact that the Confederation ships could detect the neutrino emissions of the Imperial ships meant that the Imperials could in turn detect them. Each passing hour increased the chance that the sensor suite aboard one of the Imperial ships in orbit would spot the Confederation vessels . . . or that mistake or bad luck would in some other way reveal their presence.

  Dev had wished he could try deception to get close enough to launch an attack but knew that would not be possible here. There was too much chance that the enemy commander had heard of similar deceptions, at Athena and at New America. Besides, the rebels would have to use reconnaissance probes during the approach just to find out what they were up against, and no incoming Imperial squadron would ever do that.

  An operational plan for direct attack, then, had been worked out before they'd left Herakles, and polished in sim during the voyage. The squadron would wait, lurking in the dust and maintaining communications silence for fifty hours past the arrival of the Rebel, by chance the first Confederation ship to reach Alya. During that time, all but three of the other vessels arrived—Constellation, the frigate Valiant, the corvettes Intrepid and Audacious, the big ex-tanker Tarazed, four of the five unarmed merchantmen, and, much to Dev's relief, the Vindemiatrix. Still missing were one of the merchants, the corvette Daring, and the armed transport Mirach.

  That last absence could mean trouble. Mirach was carrying half of the 1st Confederation Rangers' troops and equipment, and he didn't want to commence the attack without her, but to wait longer exposed the squadron to discovery and attack. Briefly, Vindemiatrix docked directly with Eagle's ventral access hatch, allowing personnel to cross from one ship to the other.

  Eagerly, then, Dev waited for Katya in Eagle's lounge.

  Katya, too, had been lonely throughout the long passage out from Herakles. Vindemiatrix was roomy as starships went. Less maneuverable and with a lower acceleration than any warship, she required far smaller reserves of reaction mass and could devote a much larger percentage of her onboard space to passengers than could Eagle. But even with half of her huge, rotating cargo bays equipped for passenger accommodations, Trixie was carrying nearly eight hundred troops and maintenance personnel in addition to her crew of forty-five, twice Eagle's complement crammed into vast, open dormitories that allowed no privacy at all save that of the inner world. The transport did have one hundred link modules installed in one of the zero-G bays, which meant that the passengers could enjoy a positively luxurious three hours of recjacking out of every twenty-four. The rest of the time was spent in training, shoulder-to-shoulder calisthenics in the dormitories, and classes in tactics, maintenance, field ops, and planetology delivered the old-fashioned way, by lecture instead of by cephlinkage . . . anything to keep the troops busy.

  By the time they'd emerged from K-T space, though, her unit had been ready to face any odds, any enemy, if just to escape the gray-walled prison of the transport.

  And Katya, too, for that matter. She was mildly claustrophobic, a hangover from an accident suffered while she'd been jacking a merchantman years before, an AI link failure that had left her awake but blind for long hours before her rescue. Normally, she was able to keep the feelings of dread when faced by small enclosures or pitch-blackness under control, but enduring fifteen weeks locked up in the hot, people-stinking closeness of the transport had taxed her self-control to what she was certain was her limit.

  When Katya boarded Eagle, along with her battle ops staff, she half expected herself to fall into Dev's arms in a most unmilitary display the moment she saw him. The incident aboard the ascraft months before was all but forgotten; what remained was her worry for him, and her need. But when the lounge door dissolved and she stepped into the compartment and actually saw him standing before the viewall, she found herself behind that long-held wall of her inner world, unable to bridge the gap between them.

  "Welcome aboard, Katya," he said. He was smiling, but Katya could sense the distance in him as well as in herself. Behind him, the viewall showed the Trixie backing off from the Eagle, taking up station a safe distance from the destroyer in preparation for the final jump into the inner system of Alya A. In the passageway outside, booted feet rattled across ferroplas deck plating; battle stations had been sounded, and Eagle's crew was still responding.

  "Thank you, Dev," she said, almost shyly. "It's . . . good to see you again."

  "We seem to be spending most of our time apart these days. I'm beginning to think we should see about getting ourselves assigned to the same ship . . . preferably a two-man scout."

  "I've had the same thoughts myself. Only if we did that, we might not get much work done."

  "True. And speaking of work, how would you like to link with me for the final approach?"

  She nodded. "That would be good. I'll especially want to see what you pick up on the Imperial dispositions on ShraRish when you get close enough to send in the probes."

  "Right. We don't have anything yet, of course, but we'll be launching the RD-40s as soon as we emerge from the next K-T hop. That ought to give us a pretty good look at what we're up against."

  More than anything else, the Farstar squadron needed up-to-date intelligence. Exactly what kinds of Imperial ships were in orbit, and what was their operational status? How many troops were still on the surface? What kind of orbital defenses had they built? Had their defensive status changed since the DalRiss attack?

  To find the answers to these and other, related questions, they'd planned to launch over one hundred RD-40 remotelinked scouts, a small cloud of teleoperated eyes and other senses that would provide a detailed, composite view of everything on and near ShraRish. Each scout was a small spacecraft, a thick-bodied saucer shape five meters across with almost all of its interior space devoted to reaction mass tankage. Its flattened ventral surface and stubby wings allowed the craft to operate within a planetary atmosphere. A compact Mitsubishi PV-1220 fusor unit provided thrust and shipboard power; a rather small-brained AI allowed the vehicle to be remote-jacked from one of the fleet's larger ships. Capable of pulling 50 Gs of acceleration—Gs unfelt by their pilots, who remained safe aboard the ship that launched and directed them—the RD-40s were far faster and more maneuverable than any human-occupied fighter or warflyer, and since they were expendable, they did not need to reserve reaction mass for a return trip. They were unarmed, but a command from the craft's pilot could switch off the fusorpack's containment field, causing a plasma detonation almost as powerful as a small, low-yield thermonuclear explosion. The single major disadvantage of remote scouts lay in the difficulties of teleoperating such craft over distances of more than a small fraction of a light second. Time delays while radio or lasercom signals crawled back and forth at the sluggardly speed of light made any maneuvers at long range dangerous and rendered atmospheric maneuvering all but impossible.

  As part of going to battle stations, Eagle was shifting from normal flight mode to combat mode. The rotation of her hab modules was slowed, then stopped, and the modules slowly hauled back into recesses within the ship's armored hull. In zero-G, then, Katya and her ops staff followed Dev down a connector corridor from Eagle's Number Two Hab to the main ship's access passageway running along her s
pine. An enclosed transport pod whisked them aft to Eagle's bridge, a chamber buried deep within the destroyer's hull. There, crew members waiting in the disorienting bob and drift of zero-G helped Katya and Dev slide into the padded embrace of the ViRcom modules that lined the ship's bridge and jack connectors into their C-and T-sockets. The module's hatch became solid, and Katya nervously braced herself against a darkness relieved only by the wink of system status lights. Her left palm searched for the interface panel. When she found it, she downloaded the necessary link codes . . .

  . . . and she was in space, staring into a light-frosted blackness given depth and volume by scattered stars, the glare of Alya A, and the soft-haired wisps of comets.

  "Linked in?" Dev asked her, a voice in the emptiness beside her.

  "All set."

  "Hey, Katya," Lara Anders said over the pilot's linkage. "Saw you come aboard but didn't get to say howdy. How's it feel to be aboard a real ship again?"

  "As opposed to a cattle transport? Pretty good, Lara."

  "Here's the feed on the Impie ships in-system," Dev told her.

  Data scrolled past her awareness, partly overlaying her view of space as graphic symbols marked targets and projected courses. Except for one far-distant reading that was probably a supply ship of some kind, all of the fusion-driven targets in the system save those of the Farstar squadron itself were still tightly clustered about Alya A-VI. Cross hairs were now centered over the pinpoint of light representing the planet. There was still no sign that Farstar had been detected, but she reminded herself that the radiations she was sensing now had begun their journey from the target world hours before.

  In the background, Katya heard the commanders of other ships in the squadron reporting readiness for K-T space. Only the eight warships would be making this final translation; the four merchantmen would stay behind, to stay clear of the battle and to await the arrival of the three missing ships.