by Ian Douglas
With a moment's practice, though, he'd focused his full attention in that direction . . . blocking out input from every other source. With his cephlink, he opened a secondary window, calling up a three-dimensional display of the stars of human space as they would appear when viewed from over one hundred light-years out.
Once he blocked out all but the brightest stars of the near-space display, identification was almost automatic. That was Altair, the blue-white beacon that had first attracted DalRiss attention over three years before. And over there was Sirius, and that was Vega, two beacons even brighter and hotter than Altair.
Once he'd identified Vega, finding Mu Herculis, a yellow spark a handful of light years distant, was simple.
There . . .
Dev felt the brush of something moving behind his thoughts, of DalRiss and the far stranger node of twisted perceptions and alien half thoughts that must be the ship's Achiever. Information on the Mu Herculis system downloaded itself into the alien network. He could picture golden Mu Herculis in his mind as he'd seen it last, circled at a distance by the close pair of M4 red dwarfs. The third planet turned beneath the subgiant's brassy, yellow glare; close by, the slender thread of the cast-off sky-el turned end over end in majestic wheelings. He could feel the Achiever absorbing the information, absorbing his memories of being there, the feel of that particular point in space and time.
Somewhere, deep in the ship, inexplicable energies were gathering. Dev could sense that they were drawn from Quantum Space, but he could not sense the micro-black hole pair of a quantum power tap and could not understand how the ship was accessing energies that, liberated uncontrolled, might have vaporized a fair-sized world. The power was building. . . .
And then, without fanfare, without fuss, with no more than the unsettling flash of one starscape giving way to another, the Alyan vessel hung in a new space.
Excitement drummed in every part of Dev's being. He wanted to shout . . . to scream, not with fear but with the sheer, unbridled release of pent-up emotions he'd not even known he possessed. Mu Herculis! There was no mistaking the light of that star, bathing one side of the DalRiss ship now in its warm and glorious breath. And in the other direction, there was Herakles . . . oh, God, no!
Herakles . . . for one terrifying instant, Dev thought that they'd come out in the wrong star system after all, and then he wondered if possibly they'd emerged, somehow, at the wrong time, arriving over Mu Herculis III in some long-vanished aeon when the world was still under construction.
For the planet he was looking down on was decidedly not the world he'd left three months ago. It was cloud-swathed, yes, but in black clouds rather than white, and an angry scar glared out of those clouds like a baleful red eye. God of heaven, he could feel its heat through the senses of the DalRiss ship. Around that eye, clouds swirled clockwise in a whirlpool that embraced half a world. Even as he struggled to comprehend what had happened here, Dev's mind supplied the physics: a column of rapidly rising heat was energizing a storm that might have been more appropriate to the atmosphere of Jupiter or some other gas giant. Centered in the world's southern hemisphere, the storm was given its clockwise twist by Coriolus force. That impact scar—the glowing red eye could be nothing else—had punched through the planet's thin crust like an ice pick into fruit. The central eye, he could easily see, was surrounded by a host of red sparks gleaming through the cloud cover.
Confusion . . .
"Dev Cameron, we sense confusion and fear in your thoughts."
"Damn right you do. Somebody's dropped a rock on the planet, and a goking big one."
. . . or, the detached voice of his own thoughts told him, they gave a small rock a very great deal of speed.
He stared at Herakles with a hypnotized fascination for endless seconds, then, almost reluctantly, tore his attention away. The DalRiss sensors were picking up ships, displaying them before his mind's eye as golden sparks of light, some slowly circling the stricken world, others scattered across the sky, on extended patrol. Fifteen . . . sixteen . . . eighteen . . . and more, likely, hidden behind the bulk of Herakles.
Five of those points of light in orbit pulsed brightly, and Dev sensed the power suddenly energizing them.
"Dev Cameron," a DalRiss voice said, "we have almost certainly been detected."
Yes, he could feel that too, the throbbing tingle of radar pulses painting the DalRiss ship. He wasn't sure whether the vessel gave off bursts of neutrinos on their emergence into fourspace the way human-manufactured ships did, but the magnetic field would certainly set scanners warbling at considerable distances. Several of the stars marking orbiting Imperial ships were moving. Dev's visual display did not include the conventional graphics of a human-built warship's nav or combat sims, but he didn't need computer-drawn extrapolations of course changes and outbound orbits to know that a sizable number of ships had just broken orbit and was heading toward the lone DalRiss ship.
"Can we get a closer picture of these ships?" he asked.
For answer, part of his view of space shimmered, then opened like a flower, revealing a second view of space all but filled by an almost bow-on image of a warship . . . a big warship, built long and flat, tapering somewhat toward the bow and thicker at the stern, with a virtual landscape of towers and gun turrets bristling from nearly every heavily armored surface.
He recognized the class of vessel almost at once. A kilometer long, massing millions of tons, it was a spacefaring monster, an armed and armored city housing something like five thousand Imperials. The Imperials called them Ryu, or dragonships, and named them after dragons and great birds out of Japanese mythology. With firepower enough to subjugate a world from orbit, with a full wing of eighty or more fighters stored in her hangar bays, a Ryu-ship was the most formidable of all spacefaring warships. Only nine had ever been launched, and one of those, Donryu, the Storm Dragon, had been destroyed during the Imperial assault on Herakles.
Swiftly, Dev paged through Imperial ship identification files stored in his personal RAM. Each Ryu-class ship was unique in design, with a slightly different silhouette and arrangement of laser and particle gun turrets from its sisters. There! One of eight entries matched perfectly. The vessel bearing down on them now was Karyu, the Fire Dragon. The warbook entry listed her commander as an Admiral Miyagi, though that could have changed. Miyagi was known to the Confederation as a stuffy, somewhat unimaginative officer of the formal school of Imperial naval tactics.
With firepower like that, though, Miyagi wouldn't need much in the way of imagination. And those other vessels would be Karyu's escorts, a collection of cruisers light and heavy, a number of destroyers and escorts, a section or two of patrolling fighters, plus a contingent of support and logistics vessels . . . perhaps eight or ten vessels all together, and more if this was an invasion fleet.
Without access to Confederation scanning techniques or AI-assisted identification schemes, Dev couldn't be sure how many ships there were in the Imperial battlefleet. Some of those moving stars—please, God, let it be so!—might be Confederation ships scattered by the Imperial attack. Dev couldn't count on that, though, and he didn't want to think about the alternative.
But he did notice that there was no sign of Rogue. According to his RAM ephemeris, the free-orbiting sky-el should be visible right there . . . just past the limb of Herakles and on the far side of the world, but he couldn't see it. Was that because they were in the wrong place? Because the DalRiss scanners simply weren't picking it up?
Or because it wasn't there anymore?
Dev felt a shuddering, mental chill, like a death-certain premonition of disaster. Rogue had been destroyed. Had Sinclair and the rest of the Confederation government escaped? "DalRiss!" he called suddenly. "Can you listen in on laser and radar emanations from the planet? Can we eavesdrop on them, get a picture of what's going on down there?"
"Laser, no," the DalRiss said. "We do not have the appropriate receptors, or the mechanism necessary for deciphering the light wave modu
lation. With the cloud cover, however, we doubt that lasers are being used for communication."
"That makes sense. What about radio?"
"There is considerable radio traffic on the surface. Little of it makes sense."
"Let me hear."
Noise exploded around him, most of it an eerie and singsong medley of piercing electronic squeals, chirps, and tones. Most of the Imperial traffic—and Confederation communications as well—would be coded and, again, the DalRiss had neither the equipment nor the programs to decipher them.
There were some voices, though, transmitting in the clear.
"Susume! Susume! Isoge!"
"San-ni-roku-hachi-roku-san! Chotto matte! Chotto matte! Moichido itte kudasai!"
"Dare ka? Mibun shomeisho o misero!"
"Kageni haire! Utsu! Utsu!"
Dev willed the voices to fade away. The babble of Nihongo had been so fast and furious he'd not been able to get all of it. Most of the phrases had been various military commands, though, orders to advance, to present identification, to hurry up, and even strings of numbers, probably referring to map coordinates or radio frequencies.
That last phrase, though, was revealing. Kageni haire was a command to take cover. And it had sounded like the speaker had then been giving the order to fire.
It sounded as though some Confederation personnel at least were still on the surface of Herakles, fighting on in what must be a last-ditch fight inside a literal hell.
"Dev Cameron, we should leave. Our sensors are detecting a different type of radar now, possibly associated with that large vessel's weapons-targeting systems."
"You're right." Dev felt lost, too, since he couldn't translate what he was seeing into tactically useful information. How distant was that Ryu-ship, anyway? "Can the Achiever take us back to Alya B?"
"The first Achiever is empty," the voice told him. Dev had forgotten that the creatures, for reasons yet unknown, died after a single use. "The second is ready, however, to effect a return."
Missiles were spewing from the Karyu now, the flashes of their launchings rippling across that enormous hull like twinkling sparks. That must mean they were within missile range . . . perhaps eighty thousand kilometers.
"Get us the hell out of here!"
With a silent shimmer of stars, the DalRiss vessel winked into emptiness.
Chapter 29
Always seek to master the unexpected in warfare. Surprise over an enemy on the battlefield is worth any number of armored divisions.
—Strategy and Tactics of Space Warfare
Imperial Naval War College
Kyoto, Nihon
C.E. 2530
"How many Imperial ships were there?" Lisa Canady wanted to know.
"Yeah," Vic Hagan added. "And was there any sign of an invasion fleet?"
They were gathered in the main building of the captured base on ShraRish, Dev and Katya, Hagan and Ortiz, and some thirty other senior expedition members, including both Katya's platoon and section leaders and the captain of each Confederation ship. The return from Mu Herculis had been carried out with almost deceptive ease, as the DalRiss ship materialized once again in the same orbit from which it had set out, moments before. Eagle had hailed them then, inquiring whether something had gone wrong. The alien ship had only been gone for a few moments, after all. It was still hard to imagine a space transport system that could cross interstellar gulfs in the blink of an eye.
Though the DalRiss had offered to transport Dev directly back to the surface of ShraRish, he'd elected instead to return aboard the Eagle, then take an ascraft from orbit to the roof of the ex-Imperial base. First, though, he'd had a long discussion with the DalRiss who'd been with him to Herakles and back. The delay of a few hours gave the department heads and platoon commanders back at Alya A time to assemble.
Besides, he'd needed time to digest what he'd seen and to think about the future. The discussion with the Alyans, and what he'd experienced aboard their ship, had given him a number of ideas, and there was a very great deal to consider.
He was also going to need time to sell some of those ideas to his people, and he had to think about how best to do it.
"I don't know," Dev told the assembled command staff. "I'm sorry, but I wasn't much more than an observer, and I didn't have an AI downloading enhanced imagery, IDs, or cephlink-level control through the data feeds. There were at least twenty ships in orbit around Herakles, but I couldn't tell whether they were Imperial or Confederation. There was no sign of Rogue, though it could have been behind the planet. It should have been visible, according to the ephemeris data I was using, but it's also possible we emerged into fourspace far enough off course that it was hidden. And I had no way to check the navigational feeds."
"The DalRiss," Katya said softly, "do not impress me as people who would make that kind of mistake. If they said they brought you out at a particular point in space, I'd guess that they were right."
"That's the feed I get on them too," Dev told her. "In any case, there was no mistaking that carrier. It was Karyu, and that means that at least half of the ships I saw were the other members of her battle group."
Dev pulled his gaze from Katya, and studied each of the others in the room in turn. They were seated about a large table set up in what had been a recreation room. Not for the first time, he was struck by how young nearly everyone present was. It was an unsettling feeling, knowing that Sinclair, General Darwin Smith, all of the leaders of both the Confederation government and its military might well now be dead, that this, these men and women, could well be the last vestige of the Rebellion.
"There's no hope then, is there?" Commander Robern Strong was captain of the Mirach, and his long face mirrored the emotional content of his words. "I mean, all we've got is this little expeditionary force against a Ryu battle group. And we don't even know if there's a Confederation left to go back to."
"Sinclair and the others might have made it out," Katya said. There was duralloy in her voice. "They were getting ready to leave. But even if they didn't, the Rebellion is still being fought. On Eridu. On New America. The Frontier worlds that signed the Declaration aren't going to simply give up just because Sinclair and Morton and a few hundred other people were caught or killed on Herakles. And we can't let them down."
"Katya's right," Dev said. "The Rebel Network still exists. The army we left on New America must still be fighting, even if it's a guerrilla action in the mountain outback. Liberty and Rainbow and Juanyekundu and half a dozen others haven't even been bothered yet."
"They will be, Commodore," Hagan said. "At the very least, their governors will be replaced by hard-liners sent out from Earth, and an Imperial garrison will replace the local militia and Hegemony forces. If they resist, well . . ." He spread his hands. "Bombardment from orbit might change some minds."
"Orbital bombardment is useless against guerrillas hiding out in a city," Dev said, "unless, of course, the government is willing to wipe out the whole city to get them. And actually finding them in rugged terrain and under nanoscreened shelters is a lot harder than giving the order."
"You think the Rebel Network will keep fighting then?" one of the Ranger platoon commanders asked.
"Hell, yes. The war hasn't ended," Dev insisted. "It's just entered a new phase."
"Aw, kuso, Commodore!" Lisa Canady said. Her fists were clenched on the tabletop before her, the tendons showing white against the backs of her hands. "What's the point? There's nothing we can do, no way we can make any impression at all against that battle group you saw, let alone against the whole goddamned Imperial fleet!"
"Lisa's right, Commodore," Tarazed's skipper, Captain Jase Curtis, added. He jerked his thumb back over his shoulder. "We'd be better off heading out into the unknown, find ourselves a planet where the Empire can't find us!"
Mirach's skipper nodded. "Commodore, I have to agree with Captain Curtis. We should run, and there's no shame in it. We're a handful of ships and six or eight thousand-odd people, not muc
h more than the complement of a single Ryu-carrier. We could start a new colony somewhere, a light century or two away. Then, maybe someday . . ."
Commander Ann Petruccio, captain of the Vindemiatrix, shook her head. "Gok that, Rob. I'm no settler. And I'm not going to sit around waiting for the Empire to come arrest me! I say we hit the bastards!"
"May I point out," Hagan said, "that it's a three-month passage back to Herakles? By the time we get back, any survivors there will be dead or standing trial back in the Palace of Heaven."
"If any of our ships got away," Petruccio pointed out, "they'll be seeking refuge with other Declaration worlds. We have the codes to slip in and find out where they'll be."
"Damn it," Hagan said. "How do we even know if Sinclair or President Morton or any of the rest of them are still alive? The Commodore heard scraps of radio conversation that could have been a battle, but that could have been the last of a mopping-up operation."
Lisa leaned back in her chair, her arms folded belligerently across her chest. "We could ask the Imperials, of course. They'll be here any day now!"
"That is enough!" Dev brought the flat of his right hand down on the tabletop, the crack as sharp as gunfire. "We are not going to abandon the DalRiss to the enemy, and we're not going to assume that our people are all dead or captured! We're going to fight!"
"How?" Katya asked him. "If it takes us three months to get back—"
"Damn it, don't you people understand? We don't have to take the long way back. With the DalRiss to help, we can be in orbit over Herakles within a few hours after we decide to go!"
A stunned silence descended over the table. Dev stared hard at the people who'd been opposing him one after the other, at Hagan and Strong and Curtis. He used the pause to get his own emotions back under control.
Katya had been right. He did need a keeper. His momentary link with the Naga aboard the DalRiss starship had been like the injection of some powerful and addictive drug, one that had fed the endless craving he'd been feeling for these past months. Kuso! Once you'd tasted that kind of power, how could you possibly refuse to drink of it again? To drink until that terrible thirst was quenched, until you drowned in its sweet, glorious torrents . . .