Symbionts

by William H. Keith

  “Welcome aboard, Katya,” he said. He was smiling, but Katya could sense the distance in him as well as in herself. Behind him, the viewall showed the Trixie backing off from the Eagle, taking up station a safe distance from the destroyer in preparation for the final jump into the inner system of Alya A. In the passageway outside, booted feet rattled across ferroplas deck plating; battle stations had been sounded, and Eagle’s crew was still responding.

  “Thank you, Dev,” she said, almost shyly. “It’s… good to see you again.”

  “We seem to be spending most of our time apart these days. I’m beginning to think we should see about getting ourselves assigned to the same ship… preferably a two-man scout.”

  “I’ve had the same thoughts myself. Only if we did that, we might not get much work done.”

  “True. And speaking of work, how would you like to link with me for the final approach?”

  She nodded. “That would be good. I’ll especially want to see what you pick up on the Imperial dispositions on ShraRish when you get close enough to send in the probes.”

  “Right. We don’t have anything yet, of course, but we’ll be launching the RD-40s as soon as we emerge from the next K-T hop. That ought to give us a pretty good look at what we’re up against.”

  More than anything else, the Farstar squadron needed up-to-date intelligence. Exactly what kinds of Imperial ships were in orbit, and what was their operational status? How many troops were still on the surface? What kind of orbital defenses had they built? Had their defensive status changed since the DalRiss attack?

  To find the answers to these and other, related questions, they’d planned to launch over one hundred RD-40 remote-linked scouts, a small cloud of teleoperated eyes and other senses that would provide a detailed, composite view of everything on and near ShraRish. Each scout was a small spacecraft, a thick-bodied saucer shape five meters across with almost all of its interior space devoted to reaction mass tankage. Its flattened ventral surface and stubby wings allowed the craft to operate within a planetary atmosphere. A compact Mitsubishi PV-1220 fusor unit provided thrust and shipboard power; a rather small-brained AI allowed the vehicle to be remote-jacked from one of the fleet’s larger ships. Capable of pulling 50 Gs of acceleration—Gs unfelt by their pilots, who remained safe aboard the ship that launched and directed them—the RD-40s were far faster and more maneuverable than any human-occupied fighter or warflyer, and since they were expendable, they did not need to reserve reaction mass for a return trip. They were unarmed, but a command from the craft’s pilot could switch off the fusorpack’s containment field, causing a plasma detonation almost as powerful as a small, low-yield thermonuclear explosion. The single major disadvantage of remote scouts lay in the difficulties of teleoperating such craft over distances of more than a small fraction of a light second. Time delays while radio or lasercom signals crawled back and forth at the sluggardly speed of light made any maneuvers at long range dangerous and rendered atmospheric maneuvering all but impossible.

  As part of going to battle stations, Eagle was shifting from normal flight mode to combat mode. The rotation of her hab modules was slowed, then stopped, and the modules slowly hauled back into recesses within the ship’s armored hull. In zero-G, then, Katya and her ops staff followed Dev down a connector corridor from Eagle’s Number Two Hab to the main ship’s access passageway running along her spine. An enclosed transport pod whisked them aft to Eagle’s bridge, a chamber buried deep within the destroyer’s hull. There, crew members waiting in the disorienting bob and drift of zero-G helped Katya and Dev slide into the padded embrace of the ViRcom modules that lined the ship’s bridge and jack connectors into their C- and T-sockets. The module’s hatch became solid, and Katya nervously braced herself against a darkness relieved only by the wink of system status lights. Her left palm searched for the interface panel. When she found it, she downloaded the necessary link codes…

  … and she was in space, staring into a light-frosted blackness given depth and volume by scattered stars, the glare of Alya A, and the soft-haired wisps of comets.

  “Linked in?” Dev asked her, a voice in the emptiness beside her.

  “All set.”

  “Hey, Katya,” Lara Anders said over the pilot’s linkage. “Saw you come aboard but didn’t get to say howdy. How’s it feel to be aboard a real ship again?”

  “As opposed to a cattle transport?Pretty good, Lara.”

  “Here’s the feed on the Impie ships in-system,” Dev told her.

  Data scrolled past her awareness, partly overlaying her view of space as graphic symbols marked targets and projected courses. Except for one far-distant reading that was probably a supply ship of some kind, all of the fusion-driven targets in the system save those of the Farstar squadron itself were still tightly clustered about Alya A-VI. Cross hairs were now centered over the pinpoint of light representing the planet. There was still no sign that Farstar had been detected, but she reminded herself that the radiations she was sensing now had begun their journey from the target world hours before.

  In the background, Katya heard the commanders of other ships in the squadron reporting readiness for K-T space. Only the eight warships would be making this final translation; the four merchantmen would stay behind, to stay clear of the battle and to await the arrival of the three missing ships.

  “Hang on, then,” Dev said. She heard the excitement building in his voice. “Things are going to be happening fast.”

  “That’s affirmative,” Lara said. “K-T translation in five… four… three… two… one… mark!”

  Around her, space blazed into blue-white glory.

  Eagle leaped toward ShraRish at over three hundred times the speed of light.

  Chapter 13

  … Axial tilt: 3° 05' 12"; Temperature range (equatorial): 40°C to 50°C; Atmospheric pressure (arbitrary sea level): .75 bar; Atmospheric composition: N2 83.7%, O2 8.7%, O3 3.6%, SO2 2.4%, Ar 1.2%, H2O (mean) .2%, H2SO4 (mean) 850 ppm, CO2 540 ppm…

  —Shipboard ephemeris data

  Extract on Alya A-VI

  C.S. Eagle

  C.E. 2544

  Their final immersion in the godsea lasted for less than one second, a burst of blue-white light exploding past Eagle in a shuddering surge of cold flame. The light faded again to black and the more familiar scatterings of the stars of normal fourspace as they emerged, close enough to Alya A-VI now that the planet showed a perceptible disk, close enough that there was no longer any question of masking their arrival from the enemy’s sensors. All eight Confederation warships emerged together, six hundred thousand kilometers out from the planet and still tightly clustered. With so short a jump, there was little difficulty keeping the squadron in close formation.

  Dev rode the cascade of raw data surging through his mind and exulted. Targets that had been indistinguishable point sources of neutrinos a moment before could be resolved now in detail. Two of the ships in close planetary orbit were light destroyers, almost certainly Yari-class like the Constellation, and they were the heaviest ships the Imperials had on station. Most of the rest were transports and supply ships, guarded by two frigates and a pair of corvettes.

  “Release probes!” Dev snapped over the squadron’s tactical frequency, and from each of the warships tumbled sticks of jet black projectiles, the layer of programmed nano coating their hulls drinking light and rendering them nearly invisible.

  One after another, then in twos and threes and fives, the remotes accelerated, the drive Venturis tucked into the stern of each scout silently flaring as brightly as the surface of a sun. Balancing on slender cones of star-hot plasma, each scout saucer arrowed toward ShraRish, accelerating at 50 Gs until it was traveling at better than two hundred kilometers per second.

  “Looks like we’re in luck,” Dev told Katya as they watched the constellation of drive flares dwindling into the distance. “For a change we actually outnumber and out-mass the bad guys, and that’s with three of our ships still missing.”<
br />
  “For how long?” Katya wondered. “Their relief fleet can’t be very far behind us, can it?”

  They’d discussed that aspect of the problem at considerable length before leaving Herakles. No matter how weak or strong the enemy’s strength in the Alyan system, it was a sure bet that the Imperials would be sending reinforcements, and soon. By acting immediately, as soon as they’d heard about the DalRiss attack on the Imperial base, Farstar had bought itself a small bit of time… but only as much as the Imperial Staff Command allowed them as it considered the problem at ShraRish. Imperial military reactions tended to be a long time in coming, slowed by their sheer size and ponderousness. CONMILCOM felt that this time the Imperials would move with particular deliberation, for they would be reluctant to get involved in a full-scale war with the enigmatic DalRiss, especially when the DalRiss motives for their original attack were still unclear.

  Still, some response must already be en route from Sol, one powerful enough to meet any threat—including that presented; by the Confederation force. CONMILCOM had ViRsimmed the possibilities endlessly and felt that the relief force would at the very least include four or more Amatukaze-class destroyers, like Eagle, and might very well include one of the big Ryu carriers, together with a suitable escort. Once a force that large and powerful dropped out of K-T space, the only course of action left open to the rebels would be headlong flight.

  There was a moral dilemma inherent in the situation, one that had been nagging at Katya throughout the weeks since they’d left Herakles. If the DalRiss had attacked the Imperial forces on ShraRish, logically it could only be because they felt they were strong enough to throw the Imperials out and keep them out, no matter what they sent as reinforcements. The question was, however, whether the DalRiss had a realistic understanding of just how powerful the Imperial Navy actually was. They’d seen only those Imperial vessels that had come and gone in the Alyan system over the past three years, and no one knew how good their information on Hegemony and Imperial strengths might be, or how much of that information they might understand. Chances were, they understood humans about as well as humans understood them… which meant not very well at all.

  Now the Confederation Expeditionary Force had arrived, hoping to establish a military alliance with the DalRiss, encouraging the Alyans to join in the fight against the Imperials.

  And the moment a major Imperial flight entered fourspace near Alya, the rebels would be forced to flee or be destroyed.

  The DalRiss, however, would have to stay and take whatever punishment the Empire decided to deliver against their worlds. The situation was damned near intolerable for Katya, who still chafed at Sinclair’s decision to abandon New America to the enemy. When Farstar had first been proposed, when Sinclair had first suggested that she might serve as liaison to the DalRiss, in fact, she’d thought alliance with the DalRiss might well be the one hope the Confederation had for survival.

  Now, though, she wasn’t so sure. What good would alliance with the Alyans be if all it served to do was bring them under the Emperor’s guns too? Their biologically based combat technology had lost the fight against the Xenophobe on GhegnuRish and had been losing the one on ShraRish; a relatively brief campaign by the Imperial Expeditionary Force in 2541 had destroyed the ShraRish Xeno in short order, and the IEF would have taken on the one occupying the DalRiss homeworld as well had Dev not managed to establish contact with it. Clearly, human military technology was far tougher—faster, meaner, and lugging heavier firepower—than the equivalent DalRiss biotech.

  How long could the DalRiss possibly hope to survive a full-scale war with the Empire?

  “Damn it, Dev,” Katya said, her mental voice low. “The Confederation is going to carry the guilt of their destruction for a long time to come.”

  “Sorry?” She could hear his puzzlement and knew he’d misunderstood her. “Kat, this is war. Civil war, and those are the bloodiest of all.”

  “No, I mean the DalRiss. It’ll be our fault if the Imperials come back in and raze their whole planet. They won’t have a chance.”

  “Well, I might point out that we’re here because they started shooting at the Imperials, so if they’re in a war now, it’s because they started it. That’s part of what we’re going to have to talk with them about, isn’t it?” He sounded casual, almost uncaring. “The DalRiss strike me as bright folks. Whatever their reasons for hitting the Impies, they must’ve been good ones.”

  “Kuso, Dev. How can you be so cold about it?”

  “Not cold at all. Just practical. Besides, we’re talking about an entire planetary population. If they do help us, it’ll be with… what? The secret of their magic space drive. Maybe some of their living warstriders if they really want an active part in this war, though I wouldn’t recommend putting one of those things up against a KY-1001 Katana. The Empire’ll take note, sure, and they might hit back, but they’re not going to destroy the whole DalRiss planet, any more than they’d destroy New America just to take out the few thousand people there who happen to be New Constitutionalist rebels. Hell, Katya, they couldn’t. They know Herakles is one hundred percent rebel, and the worst they might try would be saturation bombing from orbit with nukes. They can’t destroy an entire planet.”

  “A saturation nuclear bombardment could render the place uninhabitable,” Katya pointed out, “and that’s the same thing. I damn sure wouldn’t put it past them, some of them, at any rate.”

  “The Kansei,” Dev said. “Yeah. Some of them would at least give the idea serious thought. If it meant a quick, cheap end to the rebellion, well…”

  The Kansei no Otoko, the self-styled “Men of Completion,” were a faction within the highest levels of the Imperial military and government. Confederation intelligence knew little about them, save that they were dedicated to cleansing the upper ranks of both the military and civilian Imperial governments of all gaijin influence. It was strongly suspected that the previous emperor, a man known for his desire to integrate Japanese and non-Japanese leadership at all levels throughout both the Hegemony and the Empire, had been assassinated by the Kansei faction. The new Tenrai Emperor—his nengo, or era-name, meant Heavenly Thunder—was a weakling propped up on his throne by Kansei officers.

  “I don’t know about you,” Katya continued, “but I wouldn’t put anything past Munimori.”

  She meant, of course, Gensui Yasuhiro Munimori, commander of the First Fleet and a senior admiral on the Imperial Military Staff. It was he who’d issued the notorious Edict of 2543, expelling all gaijin from senior line naval posts.

  “Maybe not,” Dev agreed, somewhat grudgingly. “Still, even Munimori’s not crazy. Human-habitable planets are rare. That’s why we invest so much in terraforming the prebiotics. Even he won’t turn a world like Herakles into a radioactive desert just for the thrill of killing a few thousand rebels, right? And he wouldn’t risk genocide because a few DalRiss decided to side with us. If they side with us. We still don’t know that they will, or can.”

  “I wish,” Katya said quietly, “that I could feel as sure of that as you are.”

  It was the nature of space combat that events either dragged across vast distances, or passed so swiftly that they were beyond the reach of purely human intervention. Even accelerating at 50 Gs, it would take the teleoperated drones over eighteen minutes to cross six hundred thousand kilometers.

  Rather than wait impatiently in the primary tactical linkage, Dev chose instead to enter the computer-generated alternate reality being grown from the data transmitted back from the probes and correlated through Eagle’s AI. When he linked with the new sim, the display field was black emptiness occupied solely by the bare globe of ShraRish, so far an empty, translucent sphere.

  “Commodore Cameron,” the simulation’s director said in greeting. Commander Paul Duryea was Eagle’s senior sensor imaging specialist. “It’s too early to tell much as yet.”

  “That’s okay, Commander,” Dev replied. “I want to be here as it starts
coming in.”

  “Help yourself, then. There won’t be much to look at until we’re considerably closer.”

  A close inspection of the blank globe revealed the faint outlines of known planetary landmarks. ShraRish had no oceans or separate continents; instead, its single, globe-spanning land mass was broken here and there by large, landlocked seas, enormous bodies of water first mapped by the Imperial Expeditionary Force three years before. Still, Dev was unwilling to rely too heavily on data about the world that had come through Imperial sources. More than once, he’d seen clear evidence of Imperial attempts to alter or suppress information about the Alyan systems.

  The local atmosphere, for instance. There was no denying the fact that the ShraRish atmosphere was poisonous to humans, partly because the CO2 level of about five hundredths of one percent was dangerously high, partly because the partial pressure of oxygen was far too low. There were also significant levels of sulfuric acid on the planet, both as a vapor in the air and as a liquid component of both rain and the seas.

  Frequently in the last three years, however, information about the Alyan worlds disseminated by the Imperials had made their surface environments seem far worse than they were. The atmosphere favored by the DalRiss was described as being like that of Venus, albeit without the crushing pressures and molten metal temperatures; during one of Dev’s first ViRsimulations of a DalRiss environment, in fact, the atmospheric CO2 had been described to him as “over eighty-three percent,” which was actually the percentage of nitrogen in the planet’s air. As for the sulfuric acid, it was usually described as “dangerously corrosive.” That was true enough perhaps for unprotected metal or fabricated building materials left to face the elements for weeks at a time, and prolonged exposure by unprotected human skin was certainly not advised… but the truth of the matter was that humans could survive on the surface of either Shra- or GhegnuRish wearing nothing more than ordinary clothing, goggles to protect their eyes from the acid in the air and the ultraviolet in the sunlight, and a breathing mask to concentrate the oxygen to breathable levels and filter out about half of the CO2.