Dizzy, blind, disoriented, Dev couldn't find the mask's compartment. Gulping at the air now, straining to find substance there to keep him conscious, he sat upright in the slot. All he needed to do was touch one of the Naga's interconnected supracells…
His head banged rock half a meter above the warstrider's hull, and Dev saw a momentary explosion of green-and-purple light. Raising his left hand, he felt the rough drag of rock past the cornel-encased tips of his fingers. The RLN's hull was moving, and quickly, born on the Naga's thick embrace through the tunnel.
But which way? Up the tunnel, in pursuit of Vic? Or back the other way, toward that reeking, briefly glimpsed pit? Keeping his head low this time, he struggled into a partly upright position, groping into absolute blackness with his cornel-clad hand, trying to touch some part of the unseen mass that carried the wreckage of his strider, boatlike on gelatinous waves. He could feel the hull tipping again as it rolled over, spilling him toward the surface that carried it. Dev thrust his arm out farther, seeking contact. Where was the Naga's surface? Where?…
Pressures unbearable snapped the Scoutstrider's hull and the sides of the slot closed around his waist like the jaws of a trap. Dev screamed, the sound shrilling and echoing through the blackness. Agony tore at his lower back and legs… then vanished as he felt his spine snap.
A jolt, and he was free of the wreckage, but his back was broken and shock had left him dazed and incoherent. Strange thoughts flooded his brain but he could not order them, could not begin to understand them as anything beyond scraps of nightmare hallucination. Then, with a sudden, light-headed sense of falling, he was hurled through the opening of the tunnel and into the black and empty space of the great cavern. I'm going to die. The thought, as he recognized it as coming from some part of himself, was actually welcome, a peace that stilled the terror that threatened to rob him of his last shreds of human reason.
Seconds later, he struck the surface of the Naga. That surface was yielding, almost liquid, but Dev struck it after falling nearly fifty meters, and he hit with killing, bone-splintering force.
On the surface, Katya had broken the seal on her LaG-42 Ghostrider and was sitting up in the open hatch, keeping her left hand against the slot's palm interface so that she could stay linked with the communications net. Her full linkage had been broken, however. Impulsively, she wanted to experience her surroundings with her own senses, to see the mountain-high bulk of the atmosphere generator with her own eyes.
"Hey, Colonel?" The voice in her mind was that of her Number Two, Sublieutenant Tomid Lanager. "Don't you think you oughta button up?"
Another child, like Ken Maubry, now dead, like Chet Martin, abandoned with the other Rangers still on New America. Katya felt so very old.
"Negative," she snapped back, her mental voice harsh and biting. "Maintain your watch."
"Uh, yessir."
A half dozen other warstriders stood nearby, silently waiting. There were some people on foot, too, a platoon of armored infantry and a handful of senior officers, come to watch the great experiment. Among them was Travis Sinclair.
That's the man who sent Dev down into the hole, she thought, and she was surprised by her bitterness. She'd admired Sinclair, even loved him, in a hero-struck way. Now she saw him as another damned politician, a man so caught up in the jacker's rush of playing god that he didn't see the people around him as people. Perhaps he had once… but no more. This damned revolution of his seemed programmed for nothing but to devour children, and in the end no one would be better off for their sacrifice.
What had happened to her people - full humans and genies - back on New America?
A burst of static hissed against the background of her thoughts, then cleared. Vic's voice sounded, frantic with fear and speed. "… Hagan, do you read me? This is Hagan, does anyone copy?"
"We're here, Vic," Katya sent back. Fear clutched at her throat. "What's your situation?"
"I'm… I'm coming out. Katya, I'm sorry. Dev is lost. Dead. He must be dead."
The words left her numb, though somehow, she'd known them even before Vic had spoken. "What… what happened?"
"I don't know. We'd just reached the point where we could see the Naga-"
"You did see it, then?" Sinclair's voice cut in. Katya could see him holding a palm comm link with a cord jacked into his left T-socket. "The Naga?…"
"I saw it, yeah." Hagan's voice was dry. "It just… attacked. No reason that I could see. It just rose up and blasted into the tunnel and smashed Dev's Scoutstrider to bits."
"What about the Eriduan Naga?" Sinclair asked.
"I don't know. The thing got Fred, too. Just kind of washed over the pod and swallowed it. I didn't see any change in the thing's behavior. It just kept coming!"
"It's okay, Vic." Katya had to work hard to keep her mental voice steady. "It's okay. Are you clear now?"
"Yeah. I think so. It chased me maybe a kilometer up the tunnel, then quit. I don't see any sign of it now."
"Maybe that was the change we were looking for," Sinclair suggested. "The Eriduan fragment communicated-"
"I don't think so, General," Hagan interrupted. "Like I said, it just kept coming. Like it was mad, or something." There was a long pause. "Okay, maybe it did change its mind and turn back. But there hasn't been any attempt to communicate. And I don't… I don't think I can go back down there…"
Katya heard the agony in Hagan's voice, the unsteadiness, the indecisiveness. The man was on the raw edge of collapse, and when she closed her eyes and tried to imagine him far below the world's surface, alone, surrounded by unyielding night, she could easily understand. "Vic, you can't do anything else. Get the hell out of there." The words burned in her mind.
"But if the Naga tries to communicate-" Sinclair began.
"Dammit, there's nothing more he can do! There's nothing more any of us can do!"
"Maybe one of us could go down and look for Dev," Lee Chung volunteered. "I'll go."
"You'd be wasting your time, Lee," Hagan said. "Katya. Don't let him come. I tell you, I saw the thing tearing his warstrider to pieces! I don't see how he could have survived. Oh, damn it, Katya. I'm sorry. I'm sorry…"
"It wasn't your fault, Vic." Tears were stinging her eyes, blurring her vision. "He might… Dev might still make it."
The thought was not wholly irrational. Katya remembered well her own contact with a Naga, far, far below the humid, poisonous surface of Eridu. Somehow, the Naga she'd contacted - she found herself thinking of it as Fred's parent - had analyzed her body chemistry, then manipulated it to keep her alive, even when her survival mask's oxygen had given out. She remembered little of that encounter still, save for the first terrifying moments of it, closeted away in blackness absolute, with the weight of a world pressing down unseen above her head.
It was hard to tell, sometimes, what was memory of actual events, and what was remembered nightmare. She shuddered, pushing back unwelcome images of being buried alive.
Could the Naga hidden somewhere below the atmosphere plant keep Dev alive? She didn't have enough information to formulate an answer. The Naga was capable of it, certainly, as the Naga on Eridu had proved with her. But if Dev had already been dead when it engulfed him, even a Naga's near-miraculous mastery of chemistry would not have saved him. Xeno-phobes possessed remarkable powers of mind and of manipulation almost at the atomic level, but they were not gods.
No miracle of mere chemistry or of nanotechnics would call back the dead.
And if the thing had been trying to kill the human trespassers in its tunnel, it would have no reason to preserve his life.
She wanted to believe Dev still lived, however, and she clung to that slender thread, clutching against her awareness like a talisman.
"Vic?" Sinclair said. How she hated that voice now! "Can you patch a feed to us of what you saw?"
"Y-yeah. Stand by."
Dreading the images as she was, Katya nonetheless lay back down in her slot and jacked home her C- and T-
sockets. Full linkage with Hagan's Fastrider resumed as he sent recorded images of what he'd seen in the tunnel. Briefly, horribly, Katya relived the nightmare darkness and close-pressing walls, saw the black tide surge forward, saw Dev's Scoutstrider hit, jarred backward, then swept under by the flood. She saw Vic's last glimpse of the RLN-90, the severed, metal limbs swallowed by the onrushing wave.
She was trembling as she broke linkage, and again unbuttoned the Ghostrider's hull and sat up, blinking back tears in the pale gold sunlight.
She didn't want to accept what she'd just seen.
Hours later, Vic's Fastrider appeared at the nearest entrance to the man-made mountain. The LaG-17 looked none the worse for its experience in the bowels of the planet, but it walked with what might be described as a beaten, even a despondent slouch of alloy legs and drooping hull. In all that time, there'd been no further word from underground, and Katya's desperate hope that Dev might still be alive was relentlessly unraveling.
"You all head on back to base," Katya told the others. "I'm going to stay here."
"Katya…" Vic began.
"Damn it, Vic! Get out of here!"
"Let's go, people," Sinclair said. "Katya and Lanager will keep watch here, just… just in case Dev makes it out."
He didn't sound as though he believed it.
Katya knew she didn't. Somehow, though, she still couldn't make herself believe that he was really gone.
The other warstriders filed away, leaving the Ghost-rider in motionless, silent mourning outside the man-made mountain.
* * *
Chapter 24
If humans are master technicians, the beings known as Xenophobes are master chemists, possessing, apparently, a number of inward-turned senses that can analyze individual molecules in great detail. It is quite likely that they grow and program their own nano, and that much of their consciousness centers around, not their surroundings, but their own, inner workings.
It has been suggested that this peculiar evolution arose to keep creatures sane that, though possessing super-genius minds, remain locked away for eons in the black bowels of their unchanging caverns.
- Reflections on Intelligence
Jame Carlyle
C.E. 2543
Three days later, the Imperial squadron dropped out of K-T space on the fringes of the Mu Herculis system.
Two Kako-class cruisers, Haguro and Kinugasa. Four light cruisers, Nagara, Mogami, Suzuya, and the newly grown and assembled Zintu. Four destroyers, including the Amatukaze-class Urakaze, "the Wind in the Bay." A dozen lesser craft, corvettes and light-hulled frigates.
And leading them all was Kawashima's flagship, the massive, kilometer-long dragonship Donryu.
Kawashima was linked into Donryu's AI network, with schematics of the system unfolding with a computer's speed and crisp precision before his inner eye. Green diamonds glowed against the backdrop of stars, one embracing the golden glare of Mu Herculis A and almost lost in its light, a second surrounding the dim, red speck that was the system's red dwarf pair, and a third tagging a single, brilliant white star shining just to one side of the primary. The graphic diamonds marked nearby sources of neutrinos; the stars produced neutrinos naturally, as part of the nuclear processes burning in their cores; the white "star," however, was not a star, but a planet. A quick check of Donryu's data base called up long scrolls of data on the Mu Herculis system. The world was Mu Herculis A III, and both the planet's surface and nearby space should be dead, with all fusion plants shut down years ago. The neutrinos marking the planet indicated that someone was using fusion plants there, that they'd either fired up the big power system aboard the orbiting fragment of the sky-el, or they were generating power aboard orbiting spacecraft and with smaller plants on the ground.
Kawashima had guessed right.
Certain at first that Cameron must have gone to Lung Chi, he'd changed his mind after reflecting further. The young rebel Cameron, after all, knew as well as did Kawashima that the Imperium had full access to the histories of both him and his father. Cameron would guess, surely, that any deliberate search for him must include the Lung Chi system, even if the searchers were unaware that he had with him a fragment of tame Xenophobe and hoped to use it to make contact with the strange beings.
Dev Cameron's record, or such of it as he had access to through Donryu's data base, indicated that he had a talent for doing the unexpected. If he thought the Empire might search for him at Lung Chi, he would go to Mu Herculis instead.
Or not. The damned gaijin rebel was capable of carrying the they-know-that-I-know game back through any number of regressions. But Kawashima's gut instinct insisted that Cameron had brought the refugees from New America here, to a Xeno-dead system that no one had even thought about for twenty years. Just in case he'd guessed wrong, Kawashima had sent the remainder of Ohka Squadron - minus the destroyers he'd left at New America and the smaller craft sent to check Loki, An-Nur II, and Sandoval - to Lung Chi.
But the rebels, Kawashima had been certain throughout the month-long voyage from 26 Draconis, would be here.
Donryu's AI swiftly sorted through the flood of data swept up by the flagship's scanners, analyzing it and feeding the conclusions through to her masters. The neutrinos were from a number of sources, all closely clustered together either in low orbit or on the Heraklean surface itself. The orbital sources were consistent with the neutrino signature of ten to fifteen shipboard fusion plants set to low output, plus numerous smaller ones… a picture wholly consistent with the number of ships stolen from the Imperial shipyard at Daikoku and the raiders that had taken them. The ground sources were smaller and much more tightly grouped, fusorpacks aboard warstriders or other large vehicles, most likely, and possibly base or shipboard fusion plants as well.
He'd found the rebels.
"Captain Obayashi," he called, rasping out the order over the ship's link network.
"Hai, Chujosan!" Gonichi Obayashi was Donryu's commanding officer, Kawashima's flag captain in the parlance of an earlier, seafaring age. An efficient, tight-discipline officer with an impressive record, he'd commanded a cruiser during the Alyan Expedition and received command of Donryu as reward.
"We will implement the Noguchi option. Please make all necessary preparations."
"Ah." He could almost hear the reordering of Obayashi's thoughts. "Sir. So bold a maneuver could have unfortunate-"
"Please implement the Noguchi option, Obayashisan." He edged the polite phrasing with duralloy. "Indulge me."
There was the slightest of hesitations. "Hai. It will take a few moments for the program to run."
"Notify me when you are ready to engage. And pass the order to the other vessels in the squadron. When we move, we will move together."
Noguchi was the name of a mathematics wizard - some called him the modern Einstein - who lived and worked at Tsukinoshi, on Earth's moon. The Noguchi Equations were a complex set of variable field matrices that allowed shipboard AIs to better calculate the effects of local space curvature on orbiting singularities and to adjust the singularity harmonic tuning more precisely. In effect, they permitted warships to leave and enter K-T space far more deeply within the complex gravity wells of an inner planetary system than had ever been possible before.
Starship captains, a notoriously conservative lot, still resisted taking their huge and expensive charges under K-T drive closer than one or two astronomical units to a star; nor were the Noguchi Equations foolproof. Several vessels had been lost while experimenting with the new programs, and complex multiple star systems such as 26 Draconis increased the chance of disaster to near certainty.
Mu Herculis, however, was a simpler system; the B and C stellar components were small and far away, and Herakles, unlike New America, had no moon.
And if Kawashima took Ohka Squadron into the inner system in the normal way, it would be several days before they reached Herakles and entered planetary orbit. The rebels - he checked his inner timekeeping sense, then cross-checked it wit
h the navsim feed - would know the Imperials had arrived in another three hundred minutes. By the time the Imperials reached the planet, the rebels would be packed up and gone, accelerating toward the far side of the Mu Herculis system at 4 Gs or better.
If he could jump closer now, however, before his own ship's neutrinos crawling planetward at light speed warned the rebels of the squadron's arrival, they would achieve complete and devastating surprise.
Such suiprise was worth the risk. Kawashima wanted these people, wanted to end this ragtag revolution once and for all. Embers might smolder still on New America and Eridu, but with the leaders dead or mind-strung puppets, there would be no Confederation, no rebellion.
Within his link, he felt the flow of orders between ships, the data feeds, the terse acknowledgments. The special inner system control programs were running on all ships.
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