Symbionts

by William H. Keith

  But he did notice that there was no sign of Rogue. According to his RAM ephemeris, the free-orbiting sky-el should be visible right there… just past the limb of Herakles and on the far side of the world, but he couldn’t see it. Was that because they were in the wrong place? Because the DalRiss scanners simply weren’t picking it up?

  Or because it wasn’t there anymore?

  Dev felt a shuddering, mental chill, like a death-certain premonition of disaster. Rogue had been destroyed. Had Sinclair and the rest of the Confederation government escaped? “DalRiss!” he called suddenly. “Can you listen in on laser and radar emanations from the planet? Can we eavesdrop on them, get a picture of what’s going on down there?”

  “Laser, no,” the DalRiss said. “We do not have the appropriate receptors, or the mechanism necessary for deciphering the light wave modulation. With the cloud cover, however, we doubt that lasers are being used for communication.”

  “That makes sense. What about radio?”

  “There is considerable radio traffic on the surface. Little of it makes sense.”

  “Let me hear.”

  Noise exploded around him, most of it an eerie and singsong medley of piercing electronic squeals, chirps, and tones. Most of the Imperial traffic—and Confederation communications as well—would be coded and, again, the DalRiss had neither the equipment nor the programs to decipher them.

  There were some voices, though, transmitting in the clear.

  “Susume! Susume! Isoge!”

  “San-ni-roku-hachi-roku-san! Chotto matte! Chotto matte! Moichido itte kudasai!”

  “Dare ka? Mibun shomeisho o misero!”

  “Kageni haire! Utsu! Utsu!”

  Dev willed the voices to fade away. The babble of Nihongo had been so fast and furious he’d not been able to get all of it. Most of the phrases had been various military commands, though, orders to advance, to present identification, to hurry up, and even strings of numbers, probably referring to map coordinates or radio frequencies.

  That last phrase, though, was revealing. Kageni haire was a command to take cover. And it had sounded like the speaker had then been giving the order to fire.

  It sounded as though some Confederation personnel at least were still on the surface of Herakles, fighting on in what must be a last-ditch fight inside a literal hell.

  “Dev Cameron, we should leave. Our sensors are detecting a different type of radar now, possibly associated with that large vessel’s weapons-targeting systems.”

  “You’re right.” Dev felt lost, too, since he couldn’t translate what he was seeing into tactically useful information. How distant was that Ryu-ship, anyway? “Can the Achiever take us back to Alya B?”

  “The first Achiever is empty,” the voice told him. Dev had forgotten that the creatures, for reasons yet unknown, died after a single use. “The second is ready, however, to effect a return.”

  Missiles were spewing from the Karyu now, the flashes of their launchings rippling across that enormous hull like twinkling sparks. That must mean they were within missile range… perhaps eighty thousand kilometers.

  “Get us the hell out of here!”

  With a silent shimmer of stars, the DalRiss vessel winked into emptiness.

  Chapter 29

  Always seek to master the unexpected in warfare. Surprise over an enemy on the battlefield is worth any number of armored divisions.

  —Strategy and Tactics of Space Warfare

  Imperial Naval War College

  Kyoto, Nihon

  C.E. 2530

  “How many Imperial ships were there?” Lisa Canady wanted to know.

  “Yeah,” Vic Hagan added. “And was there any sign of an invasion fleet?”

  They were gathered in the main building of the captured base on ShraRish, Dev and Katya, Hagan and Ortiz, and some thirty other senior expedition members, including both Katya’s platoon and section leaders and the captain of each Confederation ship. The return from Mu Herculis had been carried out with almost deceptive ease, as the DalRiss ship materialized once again in the same orbit from which it had set out, moments before. Eagle had hailed them then, inquiring whether something had gone wrong. The alien ship had only been gone for a few moments, after all. It was still hard to imagine a space transport system that could cross interstellar gulfs in the blink of an eye.

  Though the DalRiss had offered to transport Dev directly back to the surface of ShraRish, he’d elected instead to return aboard the Eagle, then take an ascraft from orbit to the roof of the ex-Imperial base. First, though, he’d had a long discussion with the DalRiss who’d been with him to Herakles and back. The delay of a few hours gave the department heads and platoon commanders back at Alya A time to assemble.

  Besides, he’d needed time to digest what he’d seen and to think about the future. The discussion with the Alyans, and what he’d experienced aboard their ship, had given him a number of ideas, and there was a very great deal to consider.

  He was also going to need time to sell some of those ideas to his people, and he had to think about how best to do it.

  “I don’t know,” Dev told the assembled command staff. “I’m sorry, but I wasn’t much more than an observer, and I didn’t have an AI downloading enhanced imagery, IDs, or cephlink-level control through the data feeds. There were at least twenty ships in orbit around Herakles, but I couldn’t tell whether they were Imperial or Confederation. There was no sign of Rogue, though it could have been behind the planet. It should have been visible, according to the ephemeris data I was using, but it’s also possible we emerged into fourspace far enough off course that it was hidden. And I had no way to check the navigational feeds.”

  “The DalRiss,” Katya said softly, “do not impress me as people who would make that kind of mistake. If they said they brought you out at a particular point in space, I’d guess that they were right.”

  “That’s the feed I get on them too,” Dev told her. “In any case, there was no mistaking that carrier. It was Karyu, and that means that at least half of the ships I saw were the other members of her battle group.”

  Dev pulled his gaze from Katya, and studied each of the others in the room in turn. They were seated about a large table set up in what had been a recreation room. Not for the first time, he was struck by how young nearly everyone present was. It was an unsettling feeling, knowing that Sinclair, General Darwin Smith, all of the leaders of both the Confederation government and its military might well now be dead, that this, these men and women, could well be the last vestige of the Rebellion.

  “There’s no hope then, is there?” Commander Robern Strong was captain of the Mirach, and his long face mirrored the emotional content of his words. “I mean, all we’ve got is this little expeditionary force against a Ryu battle group. And we don’t even know if there’s a Confederation left to go back to.”

  “Sinclair and the others might have made it out,” Katya said. There was duralloy in her voice. “They were getting ready to leave. But even if they didn’t, the Rebellion is still being fought. On Eridu. On New America. The Frontier worlds that signed the Declaration aren’t going to simply give up just because Sinclair and Morton and a few hundred other people were caught or killed on Herakles. And we can’t let them down.”

  “Katya’s right,” Dev said. “The Rebel Network still exists. The army we left on New America must still be fighting, even if it’s a guerrilla action in the mountain outback. Liberty and Rainbow and Juanyekundu and half a dozen others haven’t even been bothered yet.”

  “They will be, Commodore,” Hagan said. “At the very least, their governors will be replaced by hard-liners sent out from Earth, and an Imperial garrison will replace the local militia and Hegemony forces. If they resist, well…” He spread his hands. “Bombardment from orbit might change some minds.”

  “Orbital bombardment is useless against guerrillas hiding out in a city,” Dev said, “unless, of course, the government is willing to wipe out the whole city to get th
em. And actually finding them in rugged terrain and under nanoscreened shelters is a lot harder than giving the order.”

  “You think the Rebel Network will keep fighting then?” one of the Ranger platoon commanders asked.

  “Hell, yes. The war hasn’t ended,” Dev insisted. “It’s just entered a new phase.”

  “Aw, kuso, Commodore!” Lisa Canady said. Her fists were clenched on the tabletop before her, the tendons showing white against the backs of her hands. “What’s the point? There’s nothing we can do, no way we can make any impression at all against that battle group you saw, let alone against the whole goddamned Imperial fleet!”

  “Lisa’s right, Commodore,” Tarazed’s skipper, Captain Jase Curtis, added. He jerked his thumb back over his shoulder. “We’d be better off heading out into the unknown, find ourselves a planet where the Empire can’t find us!”

  Mirach’s skipper nodded. “Commodore, I have to agree with Captain Curtis. We should run, and there’s no shame in it. We’re a handful of ships and six or eight thousand-odd people, not much more than the complement of a single Ryu-carrier. We could start a new colony somewhere, a light century or two away. Then, maybe someday…”

  Commander Ann Petruccio, captain of the Vindemiatrix, shook her head. “Gok that, Rob. I’m no settler. And I’m not going to sit around waiting for the Empire to come arrest me! I say we hit the bastards!”

  “May I point out,” Hagan said, “that it’s a three-month passage back to Herakles? By the time we get back, any survivors there will be dead or standing trial back in the Palace of Heaven.”

  “If any of our ships got away,” Petruccio pointed out, “they’ll be seeking refuge with other Declaration worlds. We have the codes to slip in and find out where they’ll be.”

  “Damn it,” Hagan said. “How do we even know if Sinclair or President Morton or any of the rest of them are still alive? The Commodore heard scraps of radio conversation that could have been a battle, but that could have been the last of a mopping-up operation.”

  Lisa leaned back in her chair, her arms folded belligerently across her chest. “We could ask the Imperials, of course. They’ll be here any day now!”

  “That is enough!” Dev brought the flat of his right hand down on the tabletop, the crack as sharp as gunfire. “We are not going to abandon the DalRiss to the enemy, and we’re not going to assume that our people are all dead or captured! We’re going to fight!”

  “How?” Katya asked him. “If it takes us three months to get back—”

  “Damn it, don’t you people understand? We don’t have to take the long way back. With the DalRiss to help, we can be in orbit over Herakles within a few hours after we decide to go!”

  A stunned silence descended over the table. Dev stared hard at the people who’d been opposing him one after the other, at Hagan and Strong and Curtis. He used the pause to get his own emotions back under control.

  Katya had been right. He did need a keeper. His momentary link with the Naga aboard the DalRiss starship had been like the injection of some powerful and addictive drug, one that had fed the endless craving he’d been feeling for these past months. Kuso! Once you’d tasted that kind of power, how could yoa possibly refuse to drink of it again? To drink until that terrible thirst was quenched, until you drowned in its sweet, glorious torrents…

  He shook himself, breaking the thing’s grip on his mind, at least for the moment.

  “Dev,” Katya said, speaking into the silence, “are you saying, I mean, do you really think we can use the DalRiss fleet?”

  “I thought you said the Aryan ships didn’t give you the control you needed,” Hagan said. “They couldn’t even feed you appropriate data.”

  “Details,” Dev said, dismissing the protest. “If we tell them what we need in the way of special equipment, they’ll provide it for us. They can grow almost anything to spec, and faster than you would think possible.”

  “We still might not be in time,” Canady pointed out. “Jumping back in an instant is great… but it’s going to take time to get ready, to make plans. Even if we could leap right now, this instant, we might be too late.”

  “And the alternative is what? To do nothing?” Dev spread his hands. “Either Morton and the rest were able to escape in the Confederation fleet. Or they’re hiding out on Herakles’s surface. Or they’re already dead or captured. We can’t affect any of that, one way or the other. But we can try. If we don’t, failure is guaranteed.”

  “There’s still the question of whether or not the DalRiss will even help us,” Katya pointed out. “They don’t want to get mixed up in our war.”

  “They aren’t looking at this as getting mixed up in our war,” Dev said. “The way they hear it, they share some common philosophical ground with us, and they’re willing to give us just about anything we ask for.”

  “What, just like that?” Lisa Canady asked. “Give us a fleet? What do they want in return?”

  “That’s just it,” Dev said. “They don’t think in terms of trade. Keep in mind that they don’t make decisions, they don’t think the way we do. Three years ago, we showed up here and stopped the Xenos from wiping them out. They are grateful—”

  “There you are, then,” Hagan said, interrupting. “You’re the, what is it? The Sh’vah. And now you’re calling the account due.”

  “Not quite. The way they look at it, we helped them because we happen to share an aspect of the way they looked at things. We didn’t want the Xenos to annihilate their civilization, and neither did they. So we helped them.

  “Now, we, the Confederation, I mean, we’re fighting a war because, as they see it, we want greater diversity within our own culture, rather than allowing ourselves to be melted down and recast in the Imperial mold. So they’re going to help us.”

  “It still looks like quid pro quo to me,” Robern Strong said. “You fight my war, I’ll fight yours.”

  Dev shrugged. “If you want to look at it that way, fine. It doesn’t make much difference. The point is, they told me that they would let us use as many of their ships as we needed for this.”

  “What, and pilots too?” Canady said.

  “And pilots too.”

  “And when an Imperial battle group comes out of K-T space over ShraRish?” Katya asked. “I don’t care what the Alyan point of view is; Tokyo has to see this as an alliance between us and the DalRiss.”

  “Then they may end up cooperating even more closely with us. I don’t know. Point is, this is what we came for. Isn’t it?”

  “I don’t see that DalRiss troops are going to be much help,” Hagan said. “Their ground forces, during the Xeno War, well, they wouldn’t stand up long against a company of warstriders.”

  “No, but there are some significant ways they can help. Most important, I think, they can provide transport. Fast transport. You’ve seen their ships. Their smallest is bigger than Eagle, and their largest is twice the size of a dragonship. I discussed the idea at length with them before I returned to the Eagle. They assure me that, yes, each of our ships could be taken aboard a big DalRiss vessel, probably a transport, since those have a lot of room inside. Jumping back to Herakles with one of our ships in its stomach would be no different, in principle, at least, than jumping there and back carrying me. When we emerge, they drop us off and we go to work.”

  Hagan leaned forward, his hands clasped together on top of the table. His eyes were wide, wondering. “You’re saying, Commodore, that we can have the DalRiss ships carry our whole fleet back to Mu Herculis? That they can drop us off where we could launch a sneak attack against the Impies, before they even knew we were back in-system?”

  Dev nodded. “We might even be able to arrange things so that they provide us with tactical mobility too, jumping in, letting us look around, then making another short jump that would put us right alongside the bad guys.” Dev looked at Captain Jothan Bailey, the commander of Tarazed’s warflyer wing. “Jo? How would you like to have your flyers deposited a
few meters off the Karyu’s port side, inside the reach of her point defense batteries?”

  “Interesting thought.…” Bailey was clearly churning through the possibilities.

  Dev turned to Katya. “And our ground troops could be placed directly on the ground, right where we wanted them, without having to take them down aboard ascraft.”

  Katya looked startled. “No orbit-to-ground assault?”

  “Don’t need it. Those starfish of theirs can materialize anywhere that can be visualized. They can appear right on the ground, or just above it, just as easily as in space. All they need is one of us, someone who’s been there, linked through the ship’s Naga to give directions. We can land troops. We could zip in and pick up our people on the ground. We could drop ships or fighters off right next to the Imperial ships, before they even knew we were there. Remember, people. In combat, surprise can be everything. And this new alliance could give us an overwhelming advantage, just in its sheer shock value.”

  “It’s like having a whole arsenal of new toys,” Hagan said. “My God…”

  “It gets a whole lot better than that.” Dev stopped, tugging at his chin with one hand as his thoughts raced. How was he going to spring this one on them? “It’s occurred to me that with the DalRiss offer, we could use the GhegnuRish Naga in, um, a rather creative way. As a weapon. And as an ally.”

  “You’re going to start throwing rocks again?” Katya asked. The words sounded light enough, but Dev saw the shadow behind her gaze.

  “No. Or at least, not entirely. You all remember Xenozombies?”

  Heads around the table nodded. Several of those present scowled, and Dev knew what they must be thinking. It was bad enough working with the Nagas. To be reminded again of the war…

  The Xenophobe War had confronted Man with nightmares in the form of an alien foe no one truly understood. For forty-some years, human defenders had battled a bewildering array of what were assumed to be the enemy equivalent of warstriders, snakelike constructs that could tunnel beneath the earth, emerge, then transform themselves into hovering combat-mode shapes that fought with nano-disassemblers and magnetically hurled bits of themselves. Only when Dev had made contact with the GhegnuRish Naga was it learned that the Xenos, with their nanotech-based cellular structure, had learned the trick as a survival mechanism. All of the strange and alien shapes encountered on the battlefield were in fact combat forms faced by the Nagas aeons ago on other worlds, patterned by the victors and incorporated into the group-memory of future Naga generations.