Warstrider: Symbionts (Warstrider Series, Book Four)

by Ian Douglas

  He'd strongly considered leaving the Trixie at the outer fringes of the system with the unarmed freighters. His decision to bring her along had been almost instinctive, born partly of the knowledge that he would need every ship-mounted weapon available in this fight, but more of the knowledge that her presence would give a shape and a form to the coming battle that it wouldn't otherwise have had. Including her in his line of battle was equivalent to a warstrider commander choosing the ground for a battle; it gave him the considerable advantage of knowing where the enemy had to attack and how he would have to maneuver to get there. For the opening few moves of the contest, Dev would know what his opponent was thinking.

  With the familiar gallop of combat linkage drumming through his awareness, Dev felt nothing for the men and women waiting out the battle, helpless within the Trixie's thin-skinned hull.

  The tactics needed to crush the Imperial force spread themselves out in his mind with crystalline clarity. To counter the expected Japanese strategy, the Confederation squadron would go in head-on in a spear-shaped formation. The first shock would be taken by the point, a three-sided pyramid, with Constellation at the apex and Valiant, Audacious, and Rebel at the three corners of the base. A thousand kilometers behind them would be four of Tarazed's six warflyer squadrons, followed by Tarazed herself. Eagle would be the spear's shaft, hanging well back, using her longer-ranged weapons to strike the enemy at a distance, while Vindemiatrix took up station even farther astern, but positioned so that she could move up and tuck herself in close to Eagle for protection if any Imperial leakers broke through.

  And they would break through. The key to this type of space naval battle, with the opposing forces on opposing courses and closing head-on was to do as much damage when the two forces interpenetrated as possible.

  With six ships in his command, the Imperial CO had chosen an octahedral formation, placing his two destroyers in line ahead, positioning the four smaller ships at the remaining four corners halfway between them. It was, Dev had to admit as he studied the approaching formation through the tactical sim, a good choice, probably the best possible given the Imperials' disadvantage in numbers. It concentrated his strongest units along the axis of the Confederation squadron and ensured that the smaller ships were well placed for maximum mutual support.

  And after that there was nothing to do but wait.

  It was a fact of modern combat that the troops—whether fighter pilots like Vandis, or striderjacks, or even legger infantry in combat armor—had at their command far more information about what was actually going on around them than had their predecessors throughout history. Direct data feeds and downloads gave them up-to-the-second information on the positions of friendly and hostile forces, gave them superbly detailed views of the fighting, allowed officers to see what their troops were seeing, permitted frontline troops to request artillery or air support and have it delivered with an accuracy that would have seemed magical to soldiers of even just a few centuries before.

  The problem—one that had plagued all of humankind since the beginnings of the Information Age five centuries before—was that often there was simply too much available information. A general in command of an army, or an admiral commanding a fleet, was expected to see the big picture without becoming entangled in the fussy detail of managing the battle at the level of individual squads, platoons, or ships. A single striderjack, on the other hand, or the pilot jacked into a warflyer or the legger crouched in a trench, didn't need to know how his decisions and actions fit into an entire, sprawling battle involving tens or hundreds of thousands of other people; indeed, it was usually desirable that he not be aware of more than his immediate responsibilities. More than once in the past, democratically run armies had faced disaster when the soldiers decided to vote on whether or not a suicide attack or a last-ditch defense or even participation in a war was really necessary.

  How much to tell the troops about a given tactical or strategic situation was one of the great ethical dilemmas of modern warfare. The technology was such that individuals like Sublieutenant Vandis could watch the entire battle unfold within their cephlinked reality. In general, and within the limits imposed by the need for security, the Confederation military was more liberal with the information it allowed its troops to have than was the Imperium, which preferred to ration battle management information to its troops with rigid and miserly precision. Often, this had worked to the Confederation's advantage—as when Dev Cameron had for purposes of propaganda and disinformation bluffed a Japanese escort captain into believing that he was a UV Cetan.

  For the moment, at least, Sublieutenant Vandis had access to very nearly as much information as had Commodore Cameron. He lay within the padded coffin of his Warhawk's slot, watching the battle unfold with the superbly sharp and crisp detail of a full cephlinked download in his mind. Acceleration had ceased some time ago and Tarazed was in free-fall, but Van felt the weightlessness no more than he'd noticed the 2 Gs after jacking in.

  Van'sGuard had been lowered into a launch tube and locked in, chambered like an eighteen-ton shell in the breech of some gigantic cannon. Though he could have maintained the feed from the probe data simulation, he'd chosen to switch that channel off in order to concentrate on more immediate problems. He was surrounded by pitch-blackness now, but he wasn't aware of the monotony of the view. He concentrated instead on the squadron's prelaunch checklist, which flickered through his mind as Commander Cole ran through the entries, a litany of ship systems answered by "go" or "no go."

  "Power systems," Commander Cole's voice announced.

  "Go," Van replied, his attention focused on the constellation of tiny green lights aglow in his mind next to scrolling blocks of data.

  "Port attitude thrusters."

  "Go."

  "Starboard thrusters."

  "Go."

  "Dorsal thrusters."

  "Go."

  "Ventral thrusters."

  "Go."

  "Thruster interlock and system program."

  "Go. And go."

  "Navigational systems."

  He checked that readout with particular care, searching for signs of the short that had been plaguing the maintenance crew, switching it on and off several times through his link. "Zeroed," he said at last. "Set and go."

  "Weapons."

  "Lasers charged to one hundred percent. Missiles loaded and safed."

  Some part of his awareness, though, was still focused on the unfolding battle ahead. Both fleets had ceased acceleration; if no further burns were made by either side, their respective lead elements would pass through one another in thirty-five minutes. The waiting, Van decided, was going to kill him long before any Imperial missile even had the chance.

  It was always this way before a launch, whether he was doing it in sim or for real. The pressure built, he felt impatient, even angry, willing the time to pass and the action to start. Later, he knew from experience, he would go iceworld, cold and hard as water ice on an outer system world at fifty Kelvin. For now, it was all he could do to focus on the simple checklist.

  "Targeting systems."

  "Checking . . . go."

  "Life support."

  "Go."

  "Communications. Switch off ship internal circuits. Go to squadron tactical."

  "Switching to squadron taccom, and testing: alfa, bravo, charlie, delta . . ."

  "Read you on taccom, Three-five. Comtest go." There was a pause as Commander Cole checked the communications frequencies of each of the other warflyers in the squadron one by one.

  "Okay, children," Cole finally announced. "That's twelve for twelve, checked and go. The Gold Eagles are ready to fly."

  Chatter from the various members of the squadron cut across Van's comm channel. "So what the hell is an eagle, anyway?"

  "A mean-ass aviform, Carey. Like a grimmoth, but bigger."

  "And extinct."

  "If they were so mean, why are they extinct?" Van wanted to know.

  "Hey, mean is
n't all there is to survival, Van," Sublieutenant Carey Graham told him. "Ask T-rex or the slashertooth grynx."

  "That's right," Lynn Kosta added. "Takes smarts, too."

  "Okay, okay, listen up, people," Commander Cole announced, breaking in. "We're getting a feed from the Fleet CO."

  "Whoa, there," Gerard Marlo said. "Deadly Dev on line, folks."

  "Here it comes."

  An instant later, it seemed to Van as though he were standing in the large compartment aboard Tarazed that served as the wing's lounge. The place wasn't large enough for the entire wing to gather at once; to Van, it looked as though only the members of his own squadron—twelve pilots plus perhaps thirty maintenance personnel and technical staff—were present, though Cameron's audience must in fact include everyone in the 1st Wing, nearly five hundred men and women all together. The viewall on one bulkhead showed space and graphic simulations both of the deployed squadron and of the approaching Japanese formation. Dev Cameron, wearing the two-tone grays of the new Confederation Navy and with a captain's insignia gleaming at his throat, stood before the 3-D display. He looked, Van thought, terribly young. What was he . . . twenty-eight, twenty-nine standard, maybe?

  But then they were all young.

  "Within the next fifteen minutes," Cameron said, starting off without preamble, "we are going to pull a type-one fleet encounter with six Imperial ships. The first shots have already been fired, the first maneuvers already implemented. I don't expect that the other fellow has any nasty surprises waiting for us, not when you remember that we are the nasty surprise for him. After all, he hasn't had time to organize anything special for us." A polite ripple of laughter ran through the lounge. Van felt a surge of impatience, though. He was ready to go, go . . . and he damn sure didn't need the pep talk that the high command always felt obligated to deliver.

  "You people don't need a speech from me," Cameron went on, almost as though he'd read Van's mind. "You know your jobs and you're the best there are at what you do. Your squadron COs'll already have downloaded the basic op orders to you, so you know as much as I do about what we're trying to accomplish.

  "What I do want to say, though, is that this one has to be one hundred percent. We must achieve total control of near-Alyan space so that we can land the Rangers and protect them. And if we don't destroy, cripple, or drive off all six Imperial ships, then they're going to be between us and our freighters back at our first entry point. If they want to, they could defeat us simply by slipping one corvette past us, heading out there and knocking off our stores ships. We'd be stuck, then, with nothing to do but turn around and go back to where we started. With rationing, we just might have enough stores left on board to make it back to Herakles, if we left right away.

  "But I'm not going back to Herakles, not until I've carried out the orders General Sinclair gave us. We came here to enlist the help of the DalRiss in the cause we're fighting for. I don't intend to go back until we have it."

  The other pilots and technicians in the simulated lounge were cheering now, and Van joined in, yelling as loud as he could. The excitement was contagious. On some quieter, deeper level, he was able to analyze Cameron's words and see them for what they were—just words, delivered without flourish or even emotion.

  But the warflyer pilots were ready to die for the man. Van wasn't sure he understood the phenomenon; all he knew was that there was something in Cameron's openness and directness, in his trust of the people under his command, that Van would have followed anywhere, even to jigoku, the icy Japanese hell.

  "We'll do our best to cripple those ships for you," Cameron continued, reaching out to point at the graphic display of the Imperial squadron on the viewall. "But we won't have the time to carve them up or deliver a killing blow. That will be your job, and I'm counting on you, on all of you, to make sure those people don't get through!

  "Good luck! Let's show the DalRiss what Confederation warflyers can do!"

  The lounge scene faded, replaced by the darkness of the warflyer launch tube. Green lights showed readiness for launch. Julio's voice called softly over a private channel. "Luck to you, Lieu. Take out one of them destroyers for me, eh?"

  "You got it, Julio."

  "And bring my girl back in one piece, or you 'n' me'll have words!"

  Van laughed. "Yes, sir!"

  "Gold Eagle clear for launch," Cole announced on the primary tac channel. "Primary sequence. Thrusters to stand by."

  And then Tarazed's launch officer was counting down the final seconds in Van's ear. "And four and three and two and one and launch!"

  There was a blur of motion, and Van'sGuard was flung outward by a powerful, surging magnetic flux. Stars, and the dazzling glare of Alya A, exploded against Van's awareness, with Alya A-VI a brilliant star almost dead ahead.

  An ice-cold calm descended on Van, clamping down over his emotions, over his impatience and the surging exultation of being in free flight once again. He gave the mental command to fire his primary thruster, and white light exploded behind his head, driving his ship forward. Astern, the five-pearls-on-a-string bulk of the Tarazed dwindled rapidly until it was nothing more than a bright star. Van countered a slight roll to starboard, then fired his ventral and port thrusters to align himself on the rest of the squadron, arrowing now straight down the axis of the Confederation fleet's course. His Warhawk's AI painted new stars of red and green on his view of space, showing the positions of the other ships ahead. A silent flare of light there marked the detonation of an Imperial missile.

  The battle proper for Alyan space had begun.

  Dev relaxed into the tactical command sim, watching the battle unfold. He'd done all that he could at this point, from double-checking the position of each ship in the deployment to that final pep talk to the pilots of the 1 st Wing. He hoped the speech had not been too transparent, too obvious in its inspirational flag-waving psychology. More than anything else, he felt that he'd had to say something, to acknowledge the bravery and loyalty of those people who were about to take eighteen-ton singleships up against Yari-class destroyers.

  Much was riding on them, and on what they would be able to accomplish against very long odds indeed.

  Flashes of light were flaring across his tactical display now. Eagle's AI identified the flashes as a barrage of EWC-167 nanomunitions, each detonation expanding rapidly into merging, mirror silver clouds composed of trillions of microscopic flecks of crystal.

  Cloudscreens, designed to reflect or scatter laser light. The Imperial fleet had ceased acceleration some time ago, so they remained behind the drifting clouds, which would render laser fire useless until they dispersed, or until the combatants were much closer than they were now.

  More time passed, the range closed. The Imperials were first to fire, loosing a cloud of teleoperated missiles. At Dev's command, countermissile fire began picking off the incoming warheads. Then the surviving missiles were close enough that point defense lasers could lock on and fire, vaporizing the swiftly accelerating missiles in soundless blossoms of light.

  Computer graphics continued to update the formations arrayed beneath his gaze. Constellation was nearing the closest of the vast, shimmering cloudscreens, traveling stern-first.

  "Now!" he ordered, and Constellation's drive venturis flared white-hot. Seconds later, their invisible exhaust of high-energy plasma seared into the approaching cloudscreen. The frigate and the two corvettes, meanwhile, accelerated sharply, rapidly overtaking the destroyer. Portions of the screen blackened or wisped away into transparency as Constellation plunged through the cloud, closely followed by Rebel, Valiant, and Audacious.

  Dev suspected that the Imperials planned to hit Constellation as soon as she emerged from the cloudscreen; he'd timed it so that all four of the ships in the Confederation vanguard would emerge at once, and at different speeds, a maneuver designed to confound the Japanese fire control AIs.

  "Dev?"

  Lasers fired, a crisscross of invisible beams of energy made tangible by Eagle's
AI, threads of green and red that instantly identified shooter and target.

  "Dev, are you there?"

  That was Katya, seeking a conference channel, but Dev ignored her. His worry about how his speech had been received was gone. In its place thundered the familiar, surging exultation of raw power, a victorious affirmation of triumph. He had brought this entire fleet to this, a frenzied few moments of largely automated maneuver and countermaneuver that would in scant seconds decide the winner.

  He watched, emotion shaking him like a storm, as Katya continued to try to break in.

  Chapter 17

  The close-range battle: takes place at ranges less than one thousand kilometers, the maximum effective reach of beam weapons—lasers, charged particle guns (CPG), and similar exotic weaponry. Also effective at short range are high-speed gunfire, "dumb" rocket barrage, and various forms of nano weaponry.

  Due to the typical high velocities of approach, this final phase of battle will last for only a few seconds at most.

  —Strategy and Tactics of Space Warfare

  Imperial Naval War College

  Kyoto, Nihon

  C.E. 2530

  "Dev! Do you copy?" Still there was no response, and Katya drew back. She could sense Dev above her in the tactical net, a massive, dark, and self-confident presence within the complex web of communications and data feeds channeling through his link.

  Bad timing, she thought. She knew he could hear her, but he was obviously focused so completely on the battle that he couldn't break away. No, wouldn't break away. It wasn't as though a squadron commander was so busy he had no time to spare at a moment like this. It was more like . . . like he didn't care.

  That couldn't be the case, not if Dev truly hadn't changed. In all the time she'd known Dev, she'd not known another man who cared more, who worried more about the men and women under his command.

  She decided to back off. A battle was no time to discuss personal frettings. Her news—that Mirach had just been picked up coming out of K-T space at the edge of the system—was available to him from other sources, and there was no reason for her to force an on-link interrupt.