Warstrider: Symbionts (Warstrider Series, Book Four)

by Ian Douglas

  Katya was pretty sure that the change she'd perceived in Dev since his encounter with the Xenolink was deepening, an isolation and a remoteness that enclosed him like a wall. What can I do? she wondered. What should I do? Has he just grown so much that we no longer have anything in common? Or is the change something worse, something dangerous?

  And how do I tell the difference?

  With black concern, she slipped out of the tactical simulation and into a new display of her own, one through which she could watch the head-on clash of the squadrons.

  Things were happening very quickly now, and she tried to tell herself that Dev's indifference had simply been his need to follow the quickening pace of the battle.

  The close-range portion of the exchange, when it came, was so brief that only later, through replayed simulations at reduced time factors, could the humans who survived it perceive exactly what had happened. With a high relative closing velocity, the two squadrons were within range of one another's lasers and other beam weapons for scant seconds. Asagiri, at the head of the Japanese formation, fired first, targeting the Constellation. Constellation replied an instant later and, to the Imperials' surprise, her first salvo was augmented by a barrage from Valiant, Audacious, and Rebel as they emerged unexpectedly from the tattering remnants of the Japanese cloudscreen. Concentrating their fire inward, they bathed Asagiri in burning, coherent light. Portions of Asagiri turned a brilliant silver as the programmed nano coating most of her outer hull flashed over to reflective mode, scattering laser light like the rainbow glint from a faceted diamond.

  High-velocity rotary cannons in snubbed, dome turrets fired streams of depleted uranium slugs, ten or twelve per second. The massive deplur rounds gave an action-reaction deceleration to the firing ships that slowed them somewhat; the projectiles' speed, combined with the high velocity of approach, sent them slamming into the target with an explosive, buzz-sawing effect, tearing out huge sections of hull plate, gouging and cratering armor, snapping off antennas and PDL turrets, crumpling sponsons and wheel habitat mechanisms in a firestorm of destructive fury. Silvered nano could not resist that sleeting assault, and lasers seared and burned where the protective film had been scraped away. Asagiri staggered beneath the combined assault; her return fire concentrated first on Constellation, then shifted to the nearer Valiant. The Confederation frigate yawed suddenly to port, her primary cryo-H storage tank slit open from fore to aft, spilling reaction mass in a gleaming, frost-silvered cloud.

  Then the Confederation ships were well past the damaged Asagiri and they shifted aim, targeting the four smaller ships at the corners of the Imperial octahedron. Reppu and Audacious exchanged repeated salvos; a lucky burst of deplur rounds slashed through Reppu's ventral hull, savaging her fusion plant and knocking both her primary and secondary power systems off-line. Instantly, Audacious shifted her targeting to the much smaller corvette Sagi. A volley of rockets—so-called "dumb rockets" because they had no AI guidance—caught the Imperial corvette along her starboard side, badly cratering her lateral weapons sponson. A particle beam from the Constellation detonated her number two hydrogen tank a half second later; the glare of the explosion illuminated the warring ships like a searchlight, casting sharp-edged shadows through a volume of space grown misty from the intermingling clouds of debris, scoured-off flecks of nano, and crystallized droplets of cryo-H and freezing atmosphere.

  Sagi's sister ship Hatukari exploded two seconds later, a victim to concentrated fire from the Rebel and from the surviving laser and cannon turrets aboard the shattered Valiant. The Imperial frigate Hayate concentrated her fire on Constellation, scoring several critical hits.

  Then the first fighter wave burst from behind the cloudscreen, descending on the Imperial squadron like a swarm of angry wasps.

  "Targeting!" Sublieutenant Vandis yelled into his link. The lead Imperial destroyer was still only a tiny graphic symbol in his display as he focused on it, bringing together the two halves of the targeting cursor and giving the download command to lock on. Other targets appeared, sleek, delta-winged Se-280 interceptors spilled from the destroyer's cargo bays, but he ignored them, knowing that at this speed of approach, they might hit him or not but that there was precious little he could do to affect their aim, one way or the other. Instead, he concentrated on the much larger and richer target ahead, a Yari-class destroyer IDed by his warbook as the Asagiri.

  Then the target was swelling huge in his vision. There was no time for anything fancy, no time for anything but the near-automatic response of intuition and training. His Warhawk mounted four MDA-74 infrared-homing missiles; a thought sent all four slashing into the target at a range of scant kilometers. Laser fire slashed at his warflyer in the same moment, the destroyer's PDLs. He felt the jolt as hull metal boiled off into space.

  Then he was past, hurtling into darkness before the detonating warheads registered in his optics. An old, old aphorism of space fighter combat held that a fighter really required a minimum crew of three: one to see the target's approach, one to watch it pass, the third to see it vanish astern. An AI worked better; for now, Van had to content himself with the words TARGET HIT that flashed four times in his vision.

  "Hit!" he called over the squadron tactical channel. "I nailed the goker!"

  Then his threat alarm went off, an insistent bleeping cutting through the background chatter of the squadron. Data on the new contact scrolled across his vision. It was a small missile, probably loosed by one of the interceptors moments earlier, but fired aft as the bad guy passed to counteract its speed. With an acceleration of 50 Gs, it had quickly killed its velocity in one direction and begun accumulating speed in the other. Now it was gaining slowly on Van's warflyer from behind.

  Van cut acceleration, then spun his warflyer end over end, seeking the oncoming missile. With a cold prickle at the back of his thoughts, he realized that his targeting system was dead. That PDL strike by the destroyer must have wiped his targeting optics . . . that or it had bored through and killed his tracking processor. He'd need to run a diagnostic . . . but he didn't have time and, more to the point, knowing what was wrong was not going to get him out of this one.

  "This is Three-five!" he yelled over the tac channel. "This is Three-five! I need assistance here!" At the same time, he spun the Warhawk again and kicked in the thruster. Perhaps he could outrun the goker. . . .

  No, that wouldn't work. The missile was gaining, and damned fast.

  "This is Three-five! Three-five! I've got an India-Romeo on my tail and I can't shake it! I need some help, somebody!"

  "Hang on, Van!" Gerard Marlo's voice rang across the taclink. "I'm on it!"

  His wingman had been following a thousand kilometers astern; when the Imperial missile locked on, he'd cut in his port thrusters and slipped neatly into its plasma wake. In his mind, Van twisted, peering back over his shoulder. Though no physical movement was involved in the linkage, the thought let him peer aft, past the plasma flare of his own thruster. He saw the missile, a graphic point of light ten kilometers astern. Then he saw Marlo's warflyer and the pulsing gleam of his laser, followed instantly by a silent flash that wiped the warhead away in a shower of molten fragments. Tiny shards of metal pinged off Van'sGuard's aft hull, but none was traveling more than a few hundred meters per second or so faster than the Warhawk and no damage was done. Van directed a relieved thought at Marlo. "Thanks, Ger! That was gokin' close!"

  "Easy feed, yujo! Where next?"

  Van returned his focus forward again. In the several seconds since the missile had picked him up, both he and Gerard had hurtled past the rest of the Imperial squadron. ShraRish hung before them, a golden sphere three-quarters full.

  "It's going to take us awhile to reverse course," he told Marlo. "And more reaction mass than I have left in my tanks right now. How 'bout we check out that planet?"

  "I'm reading ships in orbit, Van. Big ones."

  "Freighters," Van agreed. "Probably the Impie logistics ships. Let's take 'em!"


  "My mouth's watering already, yujo. Lead on!"

  Van did a quick series of calculations through the AI link. "Okay. A one-eighty flip and decelerate at five Gs for twelve minutes, with a midpoint course correction. That'll drop us behind ShraRish with just a little more than orbital velocity. Enough that we can come up over the horizon and nail those freighters from below."

  "Got it. Let's hit it!"

  Together, the two fighters flipped end over end, then cut in their thrusters.

  They would be the first Confederation ships to reach ShraRish.

  When Asagiri was damaged by the exploding probe, some time earlier, her captain had ordered that the ship be oriented in space to turn the damaged portion of its hull away from the oncoming Confederation light destroyer. Unfortunately, that meant that when the Warhawk had broken through the cloudscreen, dead on course for the Asagiri, the plasma-scorched breach in her hull happened to be facing the oncoming fighter.

  Point defenses had killed two of the four missiles scant meters from the hull, so close that the fighter's AI registered their detonations as hits. The remaining two missiles struck the light destroyer squarely, gouging deep holes in her armor, severing the main power leads, cutting primary weapons control. As power failed to the forward half of the ship, Asagiri's AI rerouted the feed through the secondary backup.

  A circuit board damaged by the earlier near miss of the detonated probe overloaded, then failed in a spectacular eruption of molten plastic and nanofilament. A relay failed to close, current arced to a fusion initiator, and the entire alfa sequencing chain went off-line and took the primary fusion containment field with it.

  For the briefest of instants, a tiny sun blossomed where an instant before there'd been a three-hundred–meter starship.

  Shosho Kenji Hattori watched a glowing number dwindle in his linked mind and knew that the battle was lost. The Imperial Navy had long taught its leaders to honor the cold, hard logic of numbers, which so often described life and death against the unyielding harshness of space. If there were six hours of air left for four men aboard an escape pod, say, then there was air for twelve hours if the number of men was reduced to two, and twenty-four if the number was only one. A radiation count of six-hundred rads in the habitat module of a stricken ship meant that nine out of ten of the unprotected crewmen there were going to die, with no right of appeal against the grim mathematics of death.

  The number Hattori was watching was the probability of success as calculated by Naginata's AI, a complex percentage drawn from such varied factors as the mass of the surviving combatants, the number of weapons remaining in action, and the amount of reaction mass necessary for the maneuvers the various ships would have to employ in order to keep fighting. At the moment, the number read twenty-three percent—less than one chance in four that the Emperor's Alyan contingent would be able to stop the rebels from achieving local space superiority.

  The situation wasn't good. Two Confederation fighters had already slipped past the battle zone and appeared to be making for ShraRish; other fighters were following, a ragged cloud of warflyers too fast and too scattered to stop. The Imperial squadron itself had lost four out of six ships; the spectacular destruction of the Asagiri alone had dropped the success probability from forty-five percent to its present level. Not counting some fourteen warflyers slapped down by the Imperials' antimissile defenses, the Confederation had lost only two ships in exchange, plus the damage wreaked against the Yari-class destroyer. The Imperial squadron had not done well this day . . . not done well at all.

  "Chikusho!" he snapped, the curse hard and violent. Savagely, he opened a tactical link to the Imperial freighters still in orbit around ShraRish. "Blue Peacocks! Blue Peacocks. This is Red Sword. The battle here is lost. Save yourselves, any way you can. I suggest you break orbit at once, get to a safe distance, then return to Earth orbit and rendezvous with the First Fleet. Hattori out!"

  He didn't bother waiting for a reply. Instead, he shifted channels to Naginata's internal communications and ordered the destroyer's captain to engage full acceleration.

  Naginata's drive plumes exploded astern, dazzling suns driving the destroyer forward under a full 6 Gs. Bits and pieces of debris—fragments of exploded missiles or the blast-shredded remnants of hull armor torn from starships—thumped and clattered along her slender, heavily armored prow. The Confederation carrier flashed past fifteen thousand kilometers to starboard, but Hattori ordered the Naginata's weapons officer to ignore it. The destroyer had already expended over three quarters of the missiles aboard, and he wanted to preserve them against the possibility of ambush later. Eagle passed seconds later, close by the Confederation transport.

  Then they were safely out of range, heading for deep space. At Hattori's command, the ship's quantum power tap was engaged, then the ship was translated into the blue flame of K-T space.

  He would decide just where it was they were fleeing to later.

  Within the victorious Confederation squadron, damage control measures were under way as personnel fought to save the damaged ships. Constellation had taken some serious hits but was not in immediate danger. Valiant was in a much more serious way; her exchange with the Asagiri had savaged her RM storage tanks and forced an automatic scram on both her fusion plants and her QPT, leaving her powerless, a drifting hulk.

  Corvettes and frigates, the low end of the mass-ordered hierarchy of starfaring warships, were hybrids. Originally designed as small, in-system escorts and patrol craft, they massed from one to five thousand tons and were powered solely by the compact fusion plants that converted slush hydrogen to plasma—simple fusion rockets incapable of traveling from one star system to another in anything less than decades.

  As Hegemony and Empire had spread through the nearer stars, however, it had been discovered that small warships, massing a thousand tons or so and with crews of 150 or less, were far more efficient at patrol duties than the light destroyers, the smallest of which were 250 meters long and massed over forty thousand tons. The reason for their enormous size, of course, was the quantum power tap arrays necessary both for channeling energy from the Quantum Sea and for prying open the fabric of normal fourspace that let the starship slip into the Kamisama no Taiyo, the "Ocean of God" where jacker-oriented maneuvers allowed the ship to bypass space, effectively traveling three to four hundred times faster than light. The smallest power tap, complete with the field generators and shielding needed to call two mutually orbiting microsingularities into existence, hold them in finely focused harmonic tuning, and channel the cascade of energy they released across the quantum barrier, required a structure the size of a skyscraper and massing forty thousand tons or more.

  The answer was to build drive modules—more popularly called skip riders—forty-to fifty-thousand–ton constructs that housed QPT and drive arrays, fusion plants, plasma thrusters, and reaction mass tankage enough to fuel the thing. The relatively tiny corvette or frigate rode perched atop the whole assembly like the upper stage of one of the clumsy, multistage rockets of the pre–fusion era of spaceflight. Using the skip rider, a frigate could make the K-T passage to another star. Once there, it could park its drive module in some convenient orbit and carry out its assigned deployment, a shark instead of a whale.

  Asagiri's barrage had gutted Valiant's drive module, leaving it a twisted tower of wreckage, half-melted and dangerously radioactive. Her crew was now hard at work attempting to release the frigate from the deadweight of its skip rider. Unfortunately, the magnetic clamps that secured the ship to the drive module had been frozen shut by the module's power failure. Rebel, braving the radiation leaking from Valiant's dangerously hot carcass, was rendering assistance, but it was too early yet to tell whether Valiant could be freed from the deadly embrace.

  The rest of the Confederation ships had begun decelerating toward ShraRish orbit.

  Slowly, slowly, Dev came down from the high-tide storm of emotion that had burst through him during the battle. God . . . he was shak
ing, or he would be, as soon as he broke his linkage and stepped out of the ViRcom module. He could feel that telltale tremulousness, the weakness that made him wonder whether he would even be able to stand once he was out of linkage.

  The battle was over. One of the Imperial destroyers, by accelerating right through the Confederation deployment, had put itself out of reach and minutes later had translated into K-T space. At ShraRish, the freighters were scattering like sheep as the warflyer wolves descended on them. Most would probably escape; with luck, the fighters might cripple one or two. Their cargoes would be welcome additions to Farstar's inventory of expendables.

  Carefully, Dev downloaded the command that would break him out of linkage, then executed the withdrawal.

  Nothing happened.

  Startled, Dev stared at his surroundings . . . still the tactical simulation showing the Confederation fleet and, ahead, the tiny gold orb of ShraRish. Something had gone wrong; he'd tried to disconnect and failed. There was no way that could have happened. The AI feed, his own cephlink, and the programs that ran the simulation, all were designed to boot him clear of the hookup should there be a major failure in any system.

  What had gone wrong?

  Again, with an almost exaggerated deliberation, he downloaded the disconnect codes, then initiated the withdrawal sequence. There was a terrifying moment of emptiness . . .

  . . . and then he was back in his physical body, lying inside the ViRcom module. Quickly, he slapped the release that freed the life-support tubes from his shipsuit and thumbed the control that dissolved an accessway through the module's side. Light spilled in from outside and he blinked; tears blurred his eyes.

  Oh, God! What happened there? He took a moment to pull a diagnostic log on his cephlink's processor. Yes . . . the correct command had been issued. A fault in Eagle's AI, or in the module hardware? The gleaming constellation of green lights on the module's panel said all was well on that end. He reran the diagnostic, tracing the scrolling lines of data flickering through his awareness farther. There! A subroutine in his own link hardware had blocked the link termination protocol before transmission to the module. He froze the mental display and stared at the data accusingly. That should not, could not have happened. He had, in effect, unconsciously stopped his own coded order to Eagle's AI to disconnect.