Warstrider: Symbionts (Warstrider Series, Book Four)

by Ian Douglas

  A cavern gaped in Daghar's belly, at a wrinkled twist in its hide where, hours earlier, it had been attached to ShraRish by what could only be described as a tree root, one as thick and as massive as any sequoia. Motes spilled from the cavern, tiny, glittering things that wafted toward Karyu on blue-glowing flickers of magnetic flame, riding the intermeshed lines of force encircling Herakles and the Heraklean sun itself like the currents of a solar wind.

  Guided by Dev and his link through Daghar's Naga, the motes hurtled toward the Karyu.

  "Go! Go! Go!"

  Katya felt herself falling through the night, suspended, momentarily, between the vast, outstretched arms of the Daghar and the elongated, patchwork clutter of armor and turrets and glowing craters that was an Imperial Ryu-carrier. In another instant, the last of the warstriders was clear and Daghar vanished, reappearing as a star in another part of the sky, the span of a fair-sized continent distant.

  Point defense lasers whirled and canted, as fire control officers noted this new threat and downloaded targeting data and calculations from the carrier's AI. One battery fired . . . then another, then a dozen more. To left and to right, above and below, Warlords and Fastriders, Swiftstriders and Ghostriders, warstriders by the dozen flared dazzlingly white as outer layers of armor boiled away into space, as the Naga fragments propelling them first charred, then exploded, unable to handle the megawatt torrents of energy slashing through their mix of natural and artificial cells.

  Katya returned fire. Neither Kurt Allen nor Ryan Green had much to do for the fall across to the Imperial ship, so each took a different weapon and began blazing away, aiming for PDL turrets, targeting radars and fire control towers.

  Halfway across, the Nagas propelling them reversed polarity and began decelerating.

  And warstriders continued to die.

  There they were.

  Vandis had seen the DalRiss ship swim into visibility a kilometer above Karyu's dorsal surface, blotting out the sun. A moment later, he'd seen the sparkle of the warstriders catching the reflected glare of Herakles as they fell, as they died in the fusillade of defensive fire from the carrier's dorsal hull mounts.

  Flashing scant meters above Karyu's armored skin, Van downloaded the commands readying both of his EWC-167 payloads. He'd hung on to them during his first pass since he'd needed to see the target to hit it, and he was damned glad now that he had. A cloudscreen, detonated there, might shield the incoming warstriders for a critical few moments. Steady . . .

  His Warhawk lurched hard to the left, wobbling out of alignment. Gok! I'm hit!

  A spacecraft flashed past at the edge of Van's field of vision; his AI captured the image, enhanced it, identified it: an Se-280 Soritaka, one of the best of the Imperial's frontline interceptors. It was slewing around as it passed, lining up for another shot. . . .

  . . . and then it exploded in an eye-searing burst of light and radiant fragments.

  "Nailed him!" Jothan Bailey's voice cried. "Three-five! See if you can slip a cloudscreen in—"

  "Already on the way!" He delivered the firing command, and a missile bearing an EWC-167 warhead streaked across the convoluted gray landscape, following the targeting guidance he'd fed to its gnat-sized brain moments before.

  The warload detonated an instant later, a silent flowering of silver between Karyu's hull and the flame-streaked night.

  The flash caught Katya by complete surprise, and for a horrible moment she thought she'd been hit.

  Then she recognized the burst for what it was, a cloudscreen detonated between the surviving warstriders and the Karyu. They were moving fast enough that they would be through the screen in seconds, but in combat seconds routinely measured the fleeting interval between life and death. For a handful of heartbeats, the deadly point defense fire was blocked, the beams scattered and reflected by the silver, mirror's sheen of the expanding cloud. Elsewhere in the sky, ships were dying, but for that critical instant nearly two hundred warstriders sheltered behind that screen . . . and lived.

  Then she was through the dispersing cloud of motes. The sensation was almost exactly like that of a warstrider air assault, punching through the cloud layer on flaring jetbacks, dropping toward the surface of a planet. The "ground" was rushing up at Katya, filling her view, as her Naga dragged at the invisible fabric of magnetism in surrounding space, slowing her . . . slowing her . . .

  Impact!

  Katya's Warlord, weightless, but still packing the inertia of a falling, sixty-ton mass, slammed into Karyu's hull with a concussion that jolted Katya and her crew even through their links.

  Through the link with her Xeno, Katya gave it orders. That way. Her Warlord skimmed low across the surface beneath a silver sky. She'd seen something that way during her descent, a crater, a gap in the Karyu's armor, a possible gateway to the spacefaring fortress's inner works.

  Other warstriders were falling out of the silver canopy on every side. "With me, Rangers!" Katya cried. "Charge!"

  Dev could feel himself losing control.

  The earlier exhilaration of controlling ten warships and eighty flyers and hundreds of warstriders like extensions of his own body had dwindled away, had vanished, at last, like a half-remembered dream as he'd watched the point defense lasers sweeping Katya's Rangers out of the sky. It had been akin to a juggler with too many balls in the air losing control, watching the balls fall one by one. The relief he'd felt when a fighter's cloudscreen had burst, sheltering the assault group the rest of the way, had been almost overwhelming . . . but it had brought with it an emotion-laden jolt: I should have thought of that! Somehow, he'd neglected to have them supplied for the warstrider assault on the Ryu-carrier. For Katya's assault, and the oversight could have killed her and every striderjack in her team.

  No, that wasn't quite correct. He couldn't forget about cloudscreens, not having used them in his spaceborne assault that had taken Eagle from her Japanese masters, and again in his raid at the Imperial shipyard at Athena. They were a basic part of modern space combat tactics, as elementary as radar, and he'd given orders to use them liberally during the approach, to screen the fighters.

  What had failed, he feared, was his identification with the men and women occupying the ships and fighters swarming now around the embattled mountain that was Karyu. He'd been thinking of Katya's striders, directed through the Naga link of his symbiosis, as a part of him, something that didn't need protection.

  Technomegalomania . . . a feeling that he was invulnerable within the aura of high-tech magic that linked him with organic minds and electronic systems distributed across a thousand kilometers of space. What he'd forgotten was that those motes drifting toward the Karyu were humans. People. Friends.

  Damn! He could have killed her! . . .

  Elsewhere, the enemy escorts were moving in closer now, and the tide of battle appeared to be swinging around, turning against the Confederation assault force. Rebel was dead. So was the corvette Daring, savaged by repeated hits by lasers, particle beams, and rounds from the carrier's hivel cannons. Constellation was adrift, her engines shut down, her maneuvering system shot to bits, though she continued to blaze away at Karyu and the other Imperial ships with as many batteries as she could bring to bear. Eagle was practically touching the Ryu-carrier, still fighting and moving but with half of her turrets out of action and a portion of her starboard flank glowing red-hot.

  In bloody exchange, one Imperial frigate had been destroyed by a missile salvo launched by Eagle, and a light destroyer had been badly damaged. A light cruiser had tried to come up astern of the Eagle, but a sudden, unexpected barrage from Constellation loosed past the looming, black-and-gray barricade of Karyu's flank had punctured the larger ship's armor in a dozen places and left her powerless, at least for the moment.

  And Dev watched over the carnage like a bloody-handed colossus, like a god of war, hurling his people into that sacrificial altar. Enemy fighters were swarming around the beleaguered Karyu now, hunting down the warstriders clinging to
her back.

  God . . . Katya! . . .

  Had his own people become such . . . such faceless tools that he no longer thought of them as flesh and blood? . . .

  A Soritaka fighter angled down out of a silver sky rapidly tattering away to star-filled black. Soundlessly, gouts of white fire erupted from the hull-metal ground twenty meters away. "Kurt!" Katya screamed over the strider's ICS. "Nail him!"

  "Tracking!"

  The Warlord's dorsal hivel cannon pivoted, and Katya sensed the vibration of its buzz saw fire . . .

  . . . and then the fighter was past them, its wings aglow in sunlight. A missile detonated, and shrapnel slapped off the hull of Katya's warstrider. A second fighter flashed in the sunlight . . . a third . . . a fourth.

  "Damn it, they're too fast!" Kurt yelled. "And there's too many of them. Here comes another! . . ."

  God, Karyu's whole damned fighter wing must be out here, picking off the warstriders like vermin. Another silent explosion, and Hari Sebree was screaming wildly in her mind's ear, a rasping wail of sheer agony . . . and then his stricken Scoutstrider ruptured in a glowing sphere of hot gas and fragments.

  The gap in Karyu's hull yawned a hundred meters ahead, a tunnel, a cavern yawning into the carrier's vitals. Katya exerted her will through the Naga and streaked across broken and flame-streaked metal toward its shelter.

  Shaken by the slaughter, shaken worse by his new insight into the bloody workings of his own mind, Dev extended his will, reaching out to the other DalRiss ships. He'd hoped to keep the other DalRiss vessels out of it. Maybe, he thought, he was still thinking like a human after all: I can't ask that of them.

  And neither could he watch the slaughter of his people and do nothing.

  In lightning pulses of thought, he relayed his last orders to the far-flung network of DalRiss ships. The DalRiss ships themselves were unarmed, but extrusions of the Naga fragment nested within each provided a weapon as devastating as any in the Confederation or Imperial arsenals. Drawing on the Dal-ships for power, the Nagas generated intense, tightly focused magnetic fields, using them to accelerate kilogram-sized chunks of themselves to speeds of hundreds of kilometers per second.

  An Imperial light cruiser overhauling Karyu from astern took a chain of five hard-flung projectiles in rapid-fire succession, the impacts flaring white-hot in searing explosions of vaporized armor and escaping gases. The bow section of the cruiser shattered, the rest of the vessel's length crumpling and folding and splitting wide open beneath that storm of high-velocity death. A corvette took three rounds and vanished in a dazzling nova-flash of light.

  Daghar, meanwhile, was moving again, gathering its energies for yet another short-range leap. Dev, his thoughts flickering from vessel to vessel, momentarily sought the bright node of familiar warmth that was Katya. Was she even still alive after descending through that wall of fire?

  Yes! He sensed her through her Naga's touch. Briefly, he glimpsed her surroundings through her Warlord's sensors . . . a storm of laser and particle beam fire as she led twenty or thirty of her warstriders toward a gaping, flame-shot maw opening in the side of the Imperial carrier.

  But enemy fighters wheeled toward her. She wasn't going to make it. . . .

  "Niner-niner," Dev said. "This is Changeling. Get ready, everybody! I'm going to provide a diversion with the Daghar! You're all on your own! When you see your chance, take it and go!"

  Goodbye, Katya. . . .

  "Good luck, all of you. . . ."

  Jump! . . .

  So far, the entire battle had been taking place in Herakles's orbit, with all of the vessels involved moving at more or less the same velocity and, except for the back-and-forth slashes of the highly maneuverable fighters, in more or less the same direction.

  Now, though, the small suns tucked away within the cavernous overhangs of Karyu's stem flashed on. Cones of charged particles, as hot as the wind sweeping from the face of the sun, blasted astern, driving the monster carrier's ponderous bulk slowly forward, and when by chance they swept across Daring's riddled and dying hulk, they turned armor incandescent and killed instantly every man and woman still alive aboard the crippled corvette.

  Faster and faster. Under one gravity of acceleration, the carrier broke orbit, angling out and away from the storm-wracked planet. Those ships that could still move and maneuver followed, Imperial and Confederation both. The hulks—Rebel and Daring and the dead Imperial escorts—the cripples—Constellation and the powerless light cruiser—remained in Heraklean orbit, falling farther and farther behind.

  "They're moving!" Katya cried over the tacnet. "The bastards are moving out!" The side of the crater lunged toward her, slammed against her Warlord's hull . . . and then suddenly there was gravity again as acceleration dragged at the strider's frame. Katya's orientation swung wildly for a moment, bringing with it a stab of vertigo. Down was that way, toward Karyu's stern, and she was balanced on the lip of a giant crater, together with a handful of other warstriders as the carrier drove "upward" into space.

  For a moment, she wondered if the Imperials were running, but immediately she discarded the idea. No, damn it, the Impies were winning . . . winning! By breaking orbit, they could lose the Constellation, which was continuing to snipe at the Imperial ships even though her main drive was down, and they might well shake some of the other ships that were snapping at her fire-torn flanks like hunting dogs. So far, the only thing keeping the Confederation ships alive was the fact the Karyu herself offered pretty good cover.

  The enemy fighters had momentarily vanished from the sky, but they would be back, matching accelerations with the Karyu and continuing to blast the warstriders from their toeholds on her hull.

  Then Daghar was back, two kilometers away and so huge it filled that half of the sky, making Katya feel as though she was clinging to the side of a cliff in a steep-sided valley, with canyon walls extending above and below her for as far as she could see.

  She'd heard Dev's transmission, but she'd been too busy at the moment for its meaning to seep through to awareness. Kuso, what was the damned fool doing now? . . .

  At a range of two kilometers, Dev was throwing rocks again . . . kilogram-sized chunks of the Naga itself, accelerated to high speed and hurled across the narrow gap into Karyu's stern section, just forward of the ravening blast of her flaring plasma drives.

  In a ship as large and as massive as the Karyu, the vast majority of the ship's hull is armor, or fuel tankage, or skyscraper-sized masses of circuits and power feeds, fusorpacks and sensor leads, all of them multiply redundant and with remarkably few vulnerable points. Ryu-class carriers were designed to survive, which meant there were no isolated places that could be precisely targeted for a kill . . . or simply taken out by a stray, lucky shot.

  At point-blank range, though, Dev could target the general area directly ahead of Karyu's huge drive venturis. Somewhere beneath meter upon meter of duralloy and fabricrete plating would be the fusion chambers that fed those flaming suns astern . . . and the pumps that fed them with cryo-H, the lasers that flashed the hydrogen to fusion heat, the fusorpack-driven generators that powered the magnetic bottles and containment fields.

  A stream of pellets slammed into Karyu's dorsal hull with an impact felt throughout the ship like the blasting of a jack hammer against a tin roof. Cubic meters of duralloy and steel vaporized; a crater yawned; inner circuitry and power feeds and tubing flashed and vanished like cotton in the blast of a blowtorch.

  For a fraction of a second, the fusion reaction in Karyu's drive chamber threatened to run wild. As magnetic grids failed, though, the ship's AI recognized the danger of imminent containment field failure and scrammed the entire network. The ship's driving suns winked out. . . .

  "Fire control!" Admiral Miyagi screamed over the combat net. "Concentrate on that damned alien!" The ship's drive had just cut out, and they were in free-fall once more. In another moment, that gaijin starfish would peel the mighty Karyu open from stern to bow. "Kill it! Kill
it!"

  Karyu's remaining weapons swung about, tracking the Alyan monster. The fighters shifted aim too, loosing the first of a swarm of missiles against the huge DalRiss ship's hull.

  Zero-G again. Katya drifted above the gaping crater in Karyu's side. The other warstriders that had been trapped with her and been freed when the carrier stopped accelerating were flashing past her and into the cavern. Others, those that had been caught by surprise when the Ryu began accelerating, were catching up now, flashing in from astern on hard-driven Naga mag fields. It was almost eerily peaceful in her small part of the battlefield. The fighters were gone, the PDL fire was concentrating on another target.

  Katya was unable to move, however, unable to will the Warlord into the yawning darkness of that cave. Her full attention was focused on the Daghar, drifting now a little way astern of the Karyu. Imperial fire was tearing into the Alyan city-ship; its organic hide was not nearly so tough or so resilient as duralloy, or the other artificial, nanolayered materials of human technology. Missiles slammed home, each one burying deep beneath the ship-creature's hide before detonating, each detonation flinging huge, fiercely radiating chunks of tissue into space.

  It looked as though the entire, star-shaped mass was burning with a radiant, white-glaring flame.

  "God!" she screamed. "God! No! Dev!"

  The DalRiss ship's explosion lit the blackness of space like the utterly silent, eye-searing flash of a supernova.

  Chapter 33

  We pay a high price for being intelligent. Wisdom hurts.

  —Elektra

  Euripides

  413 B.C.E.

  Once the Confederation warstriders smashed their way on board the Imperial Ryu-carrier, the outcome of the battle was a foregone conclusion. There were Imperial Marines aboard the Karyu, and several thousand surviving crewmen, despite heavy losses during the battle, but Imperial naval vessels did not routinely carry the sort of weapons, as shipboard sidearms, that would make any impression at all against a warstrider.