Symbionts

by William H. Keith

  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.

  “Teshio! I am Captain Kwasa of the Confederation destroyer Ya Kutisha. You will release computer control to me immediately, or you will be destroyed.”

  “This… is piracy,” Ohira said. The hesitation, the rasp in his words betrayed his confusion and his fear. He was a young man, in his early thirties, Dev guessed, and not practiced at hiding his emotions. “Piracy! I cannot surrender to you!”

  There was a world within the Shichiju, innermost planet of a red dwarf flare star called UV Ceti and known to its Swahili-speaking inhabitants as Juanyekundu, Red Star. Exploited for its mineral resources with Imperial help almost three centuries before by a consortium of African nations, the world had been abandoned, its colonists left to shift for themselves, because evacuating them would have been too dangerous and too expensive an undertaking for the then brand-new Hegemony. UV Ceti was a dim-glowing coal of a sun circling another red dwarf only marginally brighter than itself nine light-years from Earth; it was also a flare star, given to periodic seizures when a tiny portion of its surface suddenly and briefly erupted in a storm of light and hard radiation, drastically increasing the star’s brightness.

  Very few of those first colonists had survived; the descendants of those who did lived in deep-tunneled habitats kilometers beneath their world’s airless surface, but those first few generations had undergone a rather brutal selection process. Modern Juanyekundans tended to have a high tolerance for radiation, as well as the physiques and the hair and skin colorations unique now to natives of the planet. Those descendants also possessed a singular hatred for the Empire, their ancestors’ betrayer, and despite its isolationist tendencies, Juanyekundu had been among the first of the Shichiju’s worlds to side openly with the Confederation by signing the Declaration of Reason.

  Unfortunately, Juanyekundu was a poor world that possessed no warships of its own. There was no Ya Kutisha—the name was Swahili for “Terrible”—and Captain Kwasa was a fiction of Eagle’s AI. Dev was counting, however, on whatever stories Commander Ohira had heard about the Juanyekundans’ hatred for the Japanese, as well as on the physically impressive display they made over a ViRcom link. “Kwasa” towered over Teshio’s captain, his head brushing the low overhead.

  “Turn control of your computer over to us,” Dev said reasonably through his terrifying alter ego, “and we will not be forced to board your ship. As you can tell by examining our approach vector, we cannot dock with your ship and hope to capture the freighter you were escorting as well. Given a choice, we would prefer to ignore your command and take the freighter. If you would prefer, however, that we come discuss this with you personally…”

  Ohira growled something unintelligible, then acquired for a moment a glazed, faraway look, an indication that the real Ohira was somewhere else, frantically discussing the situation with his officers.

  The answer came back in seconds. “Very well, ah, Confederation destroyer.” The words were harsh, angrily bitten off. “You have control.”

  In an earlier age of broadsides and wooden decks, a beaten ship signaled its desire to surrender by lowering its flag. In space combat, surrender was signaled by granting the victor access to key computer systems. Access codes flashed back along the lasercom linkage, to be copied by Eagle’s computer personnel and sent back to unlock Teshio’s AI. There would still be reserved files within the corvette’s memory that the Confederation personnel could not read; in fact, at that moment Ohira and his people were probably busily deleting every byte of secure and classified data they could lay their figurative hands on. Teshio’s primary ship functions, however, including maneuvering and weapons, were now under Eagle’s direct control.

  “Give them damage control and enough maneuvering to stop that spin,” Dev told his own people. “Don’t give them ViRcom access until we’re clear.”

  “We should just tell the gokers to self-destruct,” a voice said. Dev thought he recognized Grier’s voice that time.

  “Negative,” he replied, an edge to his voice. “I want them to pass this story on to their bosses at New America. Now let’s run down that freighter!”

  Allowing Teshio to live would do more for the Confederation cause than would reducing the corvette to a glowing cloud of plasma. The entire rebel navy at this point consisted of Eagle and a handful of frigates, corvettes, and gunboats. They had no other destroyers of Eagle’s class… but the enemy couldn’t be sure of that, not when they’d lost several similar destroyers at Herakles. It was not impossible that several of the ships thought lost had been captured instead, to be employed against their former owners. By pretending to be captain of the Ya Kutisha, Dev was spreading doubt within the Imperial High Command about the exact composition of the Confederation fleet… and its capabilities.

  Eagle passed the helpless Teshio less than a thousand kilometers off her port beam. In another ten minutes, she was closing with the freighter, a forty-eight-thousand-ton merchantman called the Kasuga Maru.

  “I’ve got a clear reading on the ships breaking New American orbit,” Grier reported. “Two Amatukaze-class destroyers. Four smaller vessels—frigates, probably, judging from their mass readings.” Her analogue glanced up from the 3-D navigational plot, clear blue eyes locking with Dev’s. “Looks like we got their attention.”

  “Let’s see if we have the freighter’s attention,” Dev said. “Communications. Patch me through.”

  The bridge of the Kasuga Maru was tiny compared to the corvette’s, possessing only four link modules. Eagle’s data base on active commercial vessels listed her as an independent trader currently under contract to LaGrange 5 Orbital. Having once served in the merchant fleet, Dev knew that such enterprises tended to cut costs in every way they could, meaning they boosted with an absolute minimum of crew members, twelve or fifteen at the most, just enough to jack critical ship’s systems, and to ride the vanes and sweeps during godsea passage. Almost certainly, Kasuga Maru wouldn’t be carrying gun jackers or weapons officers; Class IVs devoted their hull space to cargo in any case, rather than losing precious ship mass to nonpaying systems like antiship missiles or heavy combat lasers.

  Even so, a freighter possessed weapons that could cause a problem for any warship trying to capture it, especially when there were time constraints to the operation. Kasuga Maru would possess at least two AI-governed PDL batteries as a defense against meteoroids and orbital debris. Far more deadly to a warship as large and as well armored as an Amatukaze-class destroyer, though, were a Class IV’s two Avery-Mitsubishi Sunburst fusion-plasma engines. The storm of charged particles emitted by those white-glowing venturis aft could fry any vessel coming up astern.

  Which was one reason it was imperative for a commerce raider to acquire computer control of an enemy ship before trying to overtake it.

  Kasuga Maru’s captain was a surprise, a short, older man with a red beard going gray and an angry scowl lining his features. The Imperial High Command had recently prohibits gaijin—foreigners—from serving in any command capacity aboard Imperial warships, but most Hegemony and independent vessels were manned by non-Ja
panese. Still, Dev had assumed that a cargo ship making a run from Earth to New America would have been commandeered by the Imperials. Tensions between Dai Nihon and the rest of the Hegemony had been running high of late—the Confederation had been counting on that fact to win more converts to their cause—and it seemed like a breach of security for military supplies under escort by an Imperial vessel to be in the keeping of a gaijin crew.

  The freighter’s captain, standing in a hands-on-hips attitude of sheer defiance, looked Dev’s image up and down. “Hah! So you’re the goking pirates! Bring that rattletrap of yours any closer, you black divil, an’ we’ll melt y’down for scrap!”

  Dev was still wearing the Juanyekundan analogue, of course. He had to maintain the deception if he wanted the Hegemony to believe the Confederation fleet included a destroyer with a crew from UV Ceti. That hardly seemed to account for the man’s hostility, however.

  “This is Captain Kwasa of the Confederation destroyer Ya Kutisha. Your escort has been disabled. Please release computer control of your vessel to us at once. Your cargo is being appropriated for the Frontier Confederation, but we have no desire to hurt you or your crew.”

  “Gok it! Do your worst! We’ll see how bandit scum like you likes hot protons for breakfast!”

  Dev paused, unsure of himself. He wouldn’t have hesitated to fire on the Teshio again if he’d had to. This was war, after all. The man on the Kasuga Maru’s bridge, however, was a civilian, a noncombatant. To simply burn him out of existence…

  “Kasuga Maru,” Dev said. “If I have to burn out your command center with a high-energy laser in order to save the lives of my crew, I will. Believe that. Why should you and your people be willing to die? Give us access to your AI and no one will be harmed. I promise you.”

  Dev could see the struggle going on within the man’s thoughts. Surrender clearly was a bitter pill.

  “No one aboard the Teshio was hurt,” he added. “And believe me, sir, we have a lot more reason to hate them than we do you.”

  Kasuga Maru’s captain was weighing the loss of his crew against the loss of ship and cargo. That seemed to decide him, as Dev had known it must.

  “Take the ship, you scrawny, rad-blasted goker,” he barked. “An’ be damned to ya!”

  “Thank you, Kasuga Maru” Dev told him, flashing white teeth against skin as black as space. “We will. You may take to your boats. Those among your crew who wish to join the Confederation forces may remain aboard.”

  “That’ll be the day, y’bastard. This crew’ll have no truck wi’ kaizies!”

  Kaizies—Dev guessed the word was slang based on the Nihongo kaizoku, pirate.

  “We are fighting for our independence,” Dev said slowly, trying to give the phrase a dignity that he didn’t quite feel. “We’re not pirates.”

  “Independence? You’re gokin’ pirates and thieves an’ scuttin’ bastards, the lot of you! You’re wiping us out, don’t you see? This old ship might not look like much, but she’s everything we own an’ you’re resettin’ us t’zero! Gok, you ’n the Empire can squabble with each other till universal heat death, but why do you have to drag us into it, huh? All decent folks want is t’be left alone!”

  “Relinquish control of your AI, please.”

  “There, gok you!”

  Minutes later, a lifeboat bearing Kasuga Maru’s crew accelerated clear of the freighter’s command and hab section. A hastily devised program hidden within the freighter’s life support routines and set to trigger the main engines in an uncontained fusion ignition was spotted and deactivated by Lieutenant Simone Dagousset, Dev’s chief AI programming officer, well before Eagle came up astern.

  The encounter with the freighter’s captain—his name, according to the ship records, was Alistair MacKenzie—had shaken Dev. True, the Confederation still wasn’t taken seriously by most of the people on most of the worlds of the Shichiju. Imperial control of official news and information download networks was largely to blame for that, of course. The Hegemony—and behind it, the Empire—controlled all such services on the inhabited worlds, as they controlled the ships plying the vast emptiness between neighboring star systems. News of major Confederation victories at Eridu and Herakles had been easily suppressed, while rumors of rebel uprisings on over a dozen worlds during the past two years had been downplayed as banditry and hooliganism. Small wonder the rebellion had largely been dismissed by most of humanity.

  But the evident hatred in MacKenzie’s face and voice gnawed at Dev. According to the records in Kasuga Maru’s AI, the man was a native of Alba, not one of the long-settled core worlds of the Shichiju, but a frontier colony, one still officially undecided in the struggle between Hegemony and Confederation but with a powerful anti-Imperial faction. Evidently, he and his crew had been working under contract for LaGrange 5 Orbital for nearly twenty years, receiving owner’s shares in the freighter instead of bonuses or performance incentives. In another five or ten years, when the company was ready to retire the aging freighter, MacKenzie would have been able to assume full title and put her into service as an independent merchantman.

  No wonder MacKenzie had been furious.

  Dev rarely thought of himself as a rebel… or as someone out to overturn the established order, which, of course, he most certainly was. When he let himself think about it at all, he was simply a warrior fighting for a cause in which he’d only recently started to believe. He identified with the people—the majority of people, he thought—who wanted freedom for their worlds and populations from the increasingly restrictive and suffocating central authority of a distant but too-powerful Earth.

  He never thought of himself as someone who might deliberately kill civilians, or steal their property, their livelihoods, their futures.

  Kaizoku to zoku, pirates and bandits. Was that all the Confederation’s rebellion really was? The odds of successfully taking on the entire Hegemony—and behind them the military might of Imperial Japan—were too long to think about. Until the Confederation was strong enough to win victories spectacular enough to attract the attention of ordinary Hegemony citizens despite the news blackout, pirates and bandits were what the rebels would remain.

  Dev tried to push the thought aside.

  With Kasuga Maru under Eagle’s computer control, the freighter was rotated until her main Venturis pointed at New America, and then her drive was lit. Together, the two ships decelerated at the freighter’s maximum of nearly two and a half Gs, as long-range radar and sensors continued to monitor the approach of warships from New America.

  Hours passed, and deceleration became acceleration, as Eagle and her prize slowly began building speed on a vector that would take them away from New America and the oncoming enemy squadron. At one point, both drives were silenced long enough for a ship’s boat to make the passage from the destroyer to the freighter. A Confederation crew jacked into the freighter’s empty control slots, and the drives were lit once more.

  Not long after that, with all shipjackers aboard both vessels reporting readiness for transition, Dev gave a command over the communications link, and the two ships fell into the blue-lit strangeness of K-T space.

  Chapter 3

  Each step in technology is built upon the step previous. Cephlink webs of electronic feeds, connective networks and computer chips nanotechnically grown within the sulci of the human brain, were not possible until the brain had been thoroughly mapped, right down to the molecular level of stimulus and response. And upon the cephlink rests our modern understanding of mind as distinct from brain. Modern psychology, the study of mental processes and behavior, bears no closer resemblance to its precephlink forebears than does modern cosmology to astrology, than nanotechnic materials processing to alchemy.

  —Man and the Stars: A History of Technology

  Ieyasu Sutsumi

  C.E. 2531

  Riding the currents of the godsea, Eagle and her captive fell through vistas of blue light, computer simulations of a medium that was in fact incomprehe
nsible to unenhanced human perceptions. Two days out from New America both Eagle and Kasuga Maru dropped briefly out of K-T space, emerging in the bleak emptiness of interstellar space to carefully align their four-space vector with the distant spark that was Mu Herculis.

  Against the possibility that one or the other of the vessels might not survive the coming passage, full copies of both ships’ AI data stores were made and exchanged. Ever since leaving New America, Lieutenant Dagousset aboard the Eagle and the computer techs who’d transferred to the Kasuga Maru had been working with the freighter’s AI records, unlocking and analyzing previously sealed or coded data.

  They’d struck gold with the Kasuga Maru’s capture—better, terbium, that rare lanthanide vital both in K-T drive systems and in certain types of AI circuitry. The freighter, it seemed, had been en route to New America not from Earth, but from the Imperial naval facility at Athena called Daikokukichi.

  Her last assignment before that had been as part of a military convoy to the Alyan system.

  That discovery had startled Dev and started a whirlwind of rumor and speculation within the crew.

  Alya was the ancient Arabic name for the star variously listed in the star charts as Theta Serpentis or 63 Serpentis. A double star some 130 light-years from Sol, well beyond the outer fringes of the Shichiju. Alya B-V was the original DalRiss homeworld, called GhegnuRish; there, three years ago, while serving as a Hegemony striderjack with the Imperial Expeditionary Force, Dev had first made peaceful contact with the Xenophobe infesting that world. Alya A-VI—ShraRish—was a DalRiss colony world, the location of the only large DalRiss population since GhegnuRish had been abandoned to the Xeno, millennia before.

  Kasuga Maru had been carrying food and organic manufactory materials to the Imperial base on ShraRish. While in orbit there, her commo personnel had recorded a number of exchanges between the Imperial commander in orbit and the base on the surface. They’d been passed on to the Imperial station at Athena, but for some reason—the inefficiencies of the Imperial bureaucracy, perhaps—copies had remained in the freighter’s AI storage. As he scanned quickly through the decoded recordings, Dev knew that the Confederation Military Command was going to have to see them.