Warstrider: Symbionts (Warstrider Series, Book Four) Read online

  Almost directly between New America and the Eagle, the images of the two ships the rebels were pursuing had been captured by one of the remote, high-speed probes launched minutes ago. They appeared toy-sized, their edges white-lit in the glare of 26 Draco A. Course and speed data glowing alongside each showed that the corvette was indeed slowing, blocking Eagle's approach while allowing its larger consort to continue falling toward the planet.

  A suicide's choice. A Chitose corvette massed nine hundred tons to Eagle's eighty-four thousand. One salvo from Eagle's forward laser batteries would leave the escort a riddled, airless hulk.

  "We should smash the goking bastards."

  Dev wasn't sure who'd muttered those words over the command link. He could have checked with Eagle's AI, but it didn't really matter. "Steady there," he said. "Our target is the freighter. If we stop to play with that corvette, we'll be doing exactly what they want."

  Downloading another command, Dev returned to the CDC. He could feel the tension building among the officers in the linkage, in the clipped exchanges, in the lack of the usual bridgelink banter. That was to be expected. Many of the officers and crew members aboard Eagle, including both Grier and Messier, were New Americans. It must be especially hard for them, Dev thought, to be operating within sight of their homeworld, unable to do a thing about the Imperial battlefleet holding it captive.

  Well, the war had been hard on everyone, and they all knew things were going to get worse before they got better. It was a bitterly unbalanced struggle. The Shichiju—"The Seventy," a term that had been out of date for some time, now—numbered seventy-eight populated worlds in the seventy-two star systems governed by the Terran Hegemony, the nominal government which in turn was anchored in place by the military might of Dai Nihon, the empire of Greater Japan. So far, just eleven of those worlds had declared their independence by signing the Confederation's Declaration of Reason, and of those, two of the most important, Eridu and New America, had promptly been occupied by Imperial forces.

  Until just a few months ago, New America had been the capital of the rebel Confederation, the spiritual rallying point for all of the systems that had so far broken with Hegemony and Empire. Almost fifty light years from Sol, New America was one of the richest of the Shichiju's worlds, with no fewer than three separate colonies—North American, Cantonese, and Ukrainian—and one of the precious few planets discovered so far with a native ecology where men could live without having to terraform climate and atmosphere to human specifications.

  The Empire's decision to invade New America had been a major escalation in what until that point had been little more than sparring, a contest of skirmishes, words, demands, and minor armed incidents testing willpower and resolve rather than an outright war. The invasion had marked a turning point in the war, one bearing the promise that the purchase price of Confederation independence would not be cheap.

  A second escalation had occurred at the world called Herakles, a few months later. The Confederation government, fleeing the debacle at New America, had taken refuge in a system abandoned by man decades earlier. At least part of the reason for that decision had been the presence of the Xenophobe; Dev had managed to make contact with the strange being, had enlisted its aid in the war against the Empire. Almost certainly, the Naga was incapable of comprehending such human concepts as "allies" or "war," but with the Naga joined directly with Dev's nervous system, the two of them had created . . . something new, something smarter and more powerful and far more dangerous than man or Naga alone.

  That symbiosis—Dev still had trouble confronting the memory of that time—had ended with the obliteration of a major Imperial battlefleet. Just three enemy ships had escaped to spread the news of a terrible and incomprehensible weapon in the rebel arsenal on Herakles. Early hopes that the Battle of Herakles might end the fighting and establish independence for the Confederation worlds had been dashed, however, when the Imperial Staff had announced that there could be no dialogue, no peace, and no quarter for traitors. The war was going to continue for a long time, with Naga participation or without.

  So far as New America was concerned, the Confederation would be returning there one day; the world, its resources, its people were too valuable to the Rebellion to simply abandon them to the Hegemony and its Imperial masters. That day was likely to be awhile in coming, however. The infant Confederation Navy mustered a fraction of the number of ships on the Imperial lists, and Eagle—formerly the Imperial destroyer Tokitukaze—was the rebels' single most powerful warship, dwarfed in size and firepower by the Empire's cruisers and kilometer-long dragonships. In the meantime, the Confederation would have to limit itself to hit-and-run strikes against lightly defended Hegemony outposts.

  And commerce raiding. The glowing starpoints on the 3-D navigational graphic flashed out, replaced by a combat display, gleaming colored lights floating against blackness. Eagle's weapons systems showed full readiness.

  "Identity of corvette Teshio confirmed," Eagle's communications officer reported. "They're hailing, demanding identity codes."

  "No reply," Dev said. "They know we're up to no good."

  "We're in range, Captain," Messier reported. "Starhawk Three is powered up and ready to accept link."

  "And target is launching," Grier added. "Two . . . no, make that four missiles. Definitely remote-piloted, probable Starhawk class."

  New points of light appeared on the combat display. The pace of data flow, of urgent, low-voiced exchanges between members of the bridge crew and with the enlisted personnel manning stations throughout the ship increased. It was often said, Dev remembered, that life in the military during wartime consisted mostly of sheer boredom, punctuated by rare, brief interludes of stark terror.

  The terror had begun. He knew his heart rate was up, that adrenaline was flowing through his sleeping body, though he couldn't sense the changes through his analogue.

  "Countermissile defenses standing by. Tracking."

  "Scans show nuclear warheads in those missiles, probable one-to-three–kiloton range. They're arming."

  Nukes. For centuries, Dai Nihon had maintained a monopoly on all nuclear weapons, part of the control they wielded over Earth's Hegemony. That had been changing lately, as the rebellious colonies scrambled to develop nuclear weapons of their own, but few warheads were available yet. Eagle possessed only conventional warheads in her magazines.

  Dev watched the glowing lines of light curving back from the target, seeking Eagle. Excitement thrilled through his awareness, the pulse of battle. Combat between starships took place at ranges and speeds too great for merely human minds to comprehend; the tempo was set by the AIs, the artificial intelligences that governed each ship, and which could react to sudden threats or wield laser weaponry while the electrochemical impulses warning that action was required were still crawling slowly up human optic or aural nerves. But the shape of the battle was determined by humans. Dev watched the spread of Imperial missiles as they began to curve inward toward the Eagle.

  It was time. "Launch Starhawk Three."

  The weapons officer's computer-generated analogue winked out of the CDC simulation, an electronic convention reminding the others that Messier's awareness was no longer with them in CDC, but loaded aboard the Starhawk missile now boosting toward the corvette at 50 Gs. CDC weapons control was automatically transferred to Messier's number two, a New American lieutenant named Lerran Dole.

  "Fire control reports PDLs coming on-line," Lieutenant Commander Charl Fletcher, Eagle's combat direction officer, reported. PDLs—point defense lasers—were a warship's primary defense against remote-piloted missiles like the Starhawk.

  "I'm reading Teshio's PDLs on-line as well," Grier announced. "And they're rotating their ship to give their AI the best shot with the largest number of batteries. Estimate fifteen PDL batteries will have clear fields of fire at our Starhawk."

  "That's okay," Dev said. "Let 'em." Starhawk Three would not be coming close enough to its target to trigger its
AI-controlled antimissile defenses.

  Minutes passed, the starpoints on the 3-D display slowly shifting relative positions. The red graphics marking the Starhawks drifted more quickly, swiftly bridging the narrowing gap between Eagle and the Japanese warship. Teshio's missiles had been launched first, but they'd been launched on widely dispersed paths in order to split up the destroyer's point defense batteries. They would reach Eagle at almost the same moment that Eagle's Starhawk reached the Teshio.

  "I'm within canister range," Messier's voice announced suddenly, as new targeting graphics winked on in the air above the CDC projector, bracketing the Teshio. "Targeting aft fuel tankage spaces and maneuvering jets. Detonation in three . . . two . . . one . . . fire!"

  Starhawk canister warheads were a new twist to an ancient idea. As the missile closed with the target, its orientation precisely controlled by laser sensors and the controller-AI link, a fifty-kilo charge of high explosive detonated, shredding the missile and propelling a cloud of marble-sized ball bearings in a titanic shotgun blast. Already traveling with a relative velocity of tens of kilometers per second, the shot received an additional kick from the explosion. Triggered by proximity alert sensors, Teshio's PDLs flared in rapid-fire pulses, but where an instant before there'd been a single target, now there were hundreds . . . too many for the corvette's defenses to handle in the scant seconds remaining before impact.

  "Incoming missiles entering PDL reaction zone," Fletcher announced. He might have been announcing shipboard time. "Eagle's PDLs are firing."

  "Watch it!" Dole added, and his voice betrayed the high-keyed pitch of his tension. "One's coming—"

  A dazzling, white sphere of static engulfed the combat display, momentarily blotting out the moving symbols. There was no sound, no sensation of shock or blast, but Dev knew a nuke warhead had just detonated close enough aboard to fry some of Eagle's sensors.

  But they were still in the fight or they wouldn't be wondering about it. As the static from the nuclear detonation cleared, the graphics reappeared on the combat display. An instant later, the shotgun blast from Eagle's Starhawk reached its target.

  Every projectile massed thirty grams and was moving at a velocity of twenty-five thousand meters per second relative to the target. When they struck Teshio's hull, each bore a transitional kinetic energy of 9.4 million joules, equivalent to the detonation of just under two kilograms of TNT.

  That was insignificant compared to the fury that had just brushed lightly across Eagle's hull, a blast equal to some one thousand tons of TNT. But this time there were dozens of solid strikes instead of one near miss, scattered across the aft half of the corvette. The image of Teshio transmitted from Remote Five lit up with a ragged pattern of dazzlingly bright, white pinpoints. Most of the canister in the expanding cone of shot missed the corvette completely, but those that hit gouged craters in armor, pierced cryo-H tanks like bullets hurtling through plyboard, and peeled back duralloy hull plates in a silent, deadly storm of high-energy hail. Cryo-H—slush hydrogen held at near–absolute zero temperatures—boiled as kinetic energy was transformed into heat and fuel tank walls glowed red hot. Impact, and the sudden gush of hydrogen into space, set Teshio tumbling slowly end over end, as a slowly expanding cloud of metallic debris glittered in the sunlight.

  His link with the Starhawk broken at the instant of detonation, Messier had reappeared with the other CDC officers. "Hit," he reported.

  "Teshio has lost maneuvering control," Kelly Grier announced. "They still have power and weapons on-line."

  "CDO!" Dev snapped. "Report on those Impie missiles!"

  "Our PDLs took out three of them," Fletcher replied a moment later. "The fourth detonated short, just out of effective range. That could have been due to damage from a sublethal PDL hit, or it might have been deliberate strategy, hoping to hurt us with the EMP and blast effects."

  "What's the bill?"

  "Damage control reports only minor damage to external hull, frame seven and forward. No breaches, no radiation, no casualties."

  Dev let out a small sigh. Eagle might be many times larger than the little Teshio, but size alone meant little when the other guy had nukes. But they'd survived . . . this time.

  "Communications," Dev said. "Set up that com channel now. Let's see if they'll talk to us."

  Normally, of course, the Imperials would not even consider negotiating with rebels, especially with help, in the shape of an Imperial squadron, already on the way. Teshio was damaged, but not yet out of the fight . . . and if the corvette's commander had any more nukes aboard, he might easily get lucky.

  But now that he'd gotten the guy's attention, Dev had an idea that might make Teshio's commander agree to almost anything.

  The thrill of combat singing through his mind, Dev began downloading a new analogue for himself.

  Chapter 2

  Though fraud in other activities is detestable, in the management of war it is laudable and glorious, and he who overcomes an enemy by fraud is as much to be praised as he who does so by force.

  —Discourses

  Niccolo Machiavelli

  C.E. 1517

  The crippled Teshio lay between Eagle and the fleeing freighter and had to be neutralized fast, or the Confederation destroyer risked facing another missile strike. With Imperial reinforcements already boosting clear from New American orbit, Dev had time to take the corvette or the freighter, but not both. An invisible beam of low-energy laser light tagged the Imperial ship, as Dev issued a chain of mental commands, assuming the appearance of a very special, newly programmed ViRcom analogue.

  Analogues were AI-generated programs used in ViRcommunications and in workstation simulations such as Eagle's CDC. Normally, an analogue resembled the person "wearing" it, though for a few extra kiloyen or with the help of someone skilled at reality programming, it could be spruced up with richer or fancier clothing, more attractive physical features, or the background trappings of wealth or power. A personal analogue's appearance, in fact, was one of the more important social markers throughout the shakai, the upper-class culture of Imperial society that had left its imprint on most of the cultures throughout the Shichiju.

  There was nothing to stop a user from radically changing his analogue's appearance save convention and the social risks of being found out. In fact, some such changes were obligatory. Enhancing certain aspects of one's own body for virtual sex involving two or more players, for instance, was considered quite proper, at least within certain boundaries of taste, physical compatibility, and believability. In combat, however, virtual communications were generally kept more or less honest, if only because extensive data bases on both sides could be used to check on exaggerated claims, threats, personal identities, or boasts of military prowess. A lieutenant, for instance, who impersonated a captain through a reprogrammed analogue in order to impress an opponent ran the risk of being found out and ignored. Such an imposter was sho ga nai, literally beyond help, and if he was captured, he could be killed.

  More than once in the past, though, in situations where he thought he could get away with it, Dev had deliberately used false-front analogues to deceive the enemy; in particular, he'd worn a computer-generated analogue of a Japanese naval officer to carry off a deception that allowed Eagle, a Japanese warship until her capture at Eridu, to masquerade as an Imperial destroyer, slipping unchallenged into the midst of an Imperial squadron.

  He wouldn't be able to try that particular trick again, of course. The Imperials had figured out what he'd done soon after he'd carried it off, and they would be on the lookout for such deceptions from now on. The thing had been possible at all only because he'd managed to acquire the Imperial access codes for that particular fleet operation. Likely, too, they'd changed the IFF codes on all of their fleet units, making impersonations of Imperial officers or their ships almost impossible.

  What he was trying now was similar in application to those earlier deceptions . . . but quite different in spirit. Judging from their maneu
vers so far, the Imperials clearly knew the lone destroyer was a Confederation raider. But they couldn't be sure of their opponent's exact nature.

  Within the shadow world of his awareness, Dev's 185-centimeter frame grew taller, approaching two full meters, while dwindling in mass to an almost skeletal lankiness. His skin turned black, his lengthening hair and thickening eyebrows an iridescent white. His outward appearance completely transformed, Dev opened the readied ViRcom channel to the Japanese corvette.

  Since Dev had initiated the link, an image of Teshio's bridge became the backdrop for the meeting. Though the reality aboard the damaged corvette must by this time be a confusion of zero-G, smoke, and pressure loss alarms, the scene showed no urgency. The looming bulk of the bridge link modules crowded one another beneath a low, conduit-covered overhead. Only one figure was visible, the image of a Japanese naval officer in formal dress blacks. The link program maintained the illusion of gravity.

  "This is Shosa Ohira, of the Imperial corvette Teshio" the figure said stiffly, facing Dev. "I demand—"

  "You will demand nothing," Dev interrupted, barking the phrase in Nihongo. He waited then, allowing Ohira to see and understand the image before him now. The Imperial's analogue would not betray its owner through any physical change in expression, of course, but Dev did see the man's eyes widen slightly and guessed that Ohira knew what was confronting him.