by Ian Douglas
Perhaps the strangest aspect for Katya was a change she'd discovered in herself. She was riding in darkness, literally in the bowels of the beast, unable to move, unable to see anything at all with her Warlord's sensors blocked by the embrace of the creature-ship around her. Always before, darkness and the inability to move had all but shut her mind down as she battled the gibbering terror of her claustrophobia. It would have been wrong to say she felt nothing. The darkness was unpleasant, almost painful, and even worse was the nerve-grating helplessness, knowing that a battle was raging somewhere out there, beyond these walls of alien flesh, and she could do nothing to fight, to run, to hide, or even to know.
But there was no panic . . . only a cold, sure knowledge that this was what she had to do. For the Rebellion. For Dev. For herself.
She was pretty sure that the claustrophobia hadn't kicked in because, for so long now, her attention had been so completely focused on Dev, on what was happening to him. This strange mix-and-match of human and nonhuman minds was the stuff of nightmares.
Katya shuddered. It wasn't her own Xenolink; she'd linked with them before without any particular problem. She could feel the Naga fragment embracing her Warlord's legs and hip joints now and knew that she only had to open a particular communications circuit and its strangeness, sensed now as that rippling undercurrent of alien thought about Self and »self«, would fill her mind.
No, it was Dev and what he'd become, remote and godlike in the embrace of Daghar's Naga. She wondered how he was handling his role, coordinating the entire battle from the womblike embrace of Daghar's human-conditioned inner sanctum.
She listened to the murmuring silence, watching the enfolding darkness . . . and like the warriors of ten thousand years of battles, waited for the orders that would send her from the twilight world of waiting and into the blaze of combat.
It was like being God.
Dev could feel the power surging around him, through him, felt the challenge and the pounding bloodlust of single combat on a scale no mere human had ever known. He was completely unaware of the Daghar, save through a kinesthetic sense. He stood in space, motionless relative to the mountain-sized mass of the Karyu . . . and through the Xenolink the other ships, DalRiss and human as well, all felt like parts of that body, reaching out as he would stretch out his hand.
Sometimes he spoke, his words link-transmitted to the appropriate ship or ships through the DalRiss communications net. In a sense, Dev's mind was no longer wholly within the Daghar, but scattered across the entire combined fleet. He could feel the flutter of probing, targeting radar, feel the prick and stab and sting of beams and missiles, hear the steady, background roar of thousands of voices speaking, ordering, acknowledging, shouting, pleading, praying at once.
He felt the waiting hundreds of warstriders still huddled inside Daghar's belly. Soon . . .
Sublieutenant Vandis tried to concentrate on targeting the monster ship that filled his forward view, but ships, warflyers, his friends were dying in the sky all around him. Lynn Kosta's ship brushed the deadly, invisible flame of a particle beam, and then her warflyer, half molten and half crumpled hull and internal wiring spilling like a disembowelment, was spinning end over end over end as glowing fragments scattered across the night. "I've got lock!" Al Horst screamed. "Target lock! I'm—" and then he was gone too, his Warhawk vaporized by a laser pulse that chopped through the warflyer like a white-hot iron through plastic.
Marlo . . . where was Marlo? "Three-seven! Three-seven! Where the gok are you, Ger?"
"On your five and low. Jesus, Van, it's a firestorm!"
"Watch the PDLs and pull in tight! I'm targeting amidships, where there should be a cryo-H tank as big as the gokin' Eagle. You with me?"
"With you! Punch it!"
Acceleration . . . and the two Warhawks leaped side by side toward the monster.
"Van! I got targeting radar lock! Watch it! Watch—"
Vandis flinched as white flame blossomed off his starboard side and aft. Gerard Marlo's Warhawk flared like a tiny sun, duralloy and steel and plastic and flesh and blood all boiling away in a puff of star-hot vapor.
Oh, kuso, kuso! . . .
No time. Karyu was a mountain . . . a world looming ahead and below. A target . . . he needed a target . . . that crater! Vandis put his Warhawk into a slow spin, the movement crafted to keep tracking as the hurtling warflyer streaked across the carrier's hull at a range of less than five hundred meters. The warflyer's AI gave him the precise tick when range, speed, and vector all were perfect; he downloaded the command code and the Warhawk fired, sending two auto-linked Starhawk missiles streaking into the glowing ruin of a crater that gaped in Karyu's side like the imprint of some angry giant's fist.
Hit! . . .
Red-glowing duralloy flared white, blossoming outward in a cloud of million-degree plasma. The crater floor dissolved in light, then gaped open, spilling molten gobbets of metal and burning hydrogen that washed across Van'sGuard like a white-hot sea.
Then he was through the cloud and into the open. Stabilizing his ship's spin, he angled his stern toward his line of flight and triggered his drive, full power. The Warhawk bucked and shuddered as he piled on the Gs.
He'd managed to slip in and deliver his punch, but the battle was still going all wrong, so far as he could tell. The main ships in the Confederation squadron were taking a hellacious pounding. God, Constellation looked like she was nearly done . . . and Rebel was dead and Christ, where were Cameron and his damned, Naga-jinxed warstriders?
Vandis had expended his missiles, but he still had his lasers. He would make another pass. At the very least, some of those gunners jacked into Karyu's fire control might fire at him, instead of at one of his buddies.
Its velocity in one direction killed, Van'sGuard began accelerating on a new vector, angling back toward the flame-wracked mountain of Karyu.
Some of Dev's confidence had deserted him. The battle had been raging for almost two minutes now, and while Karyu had been hit dozens of times, her firepower was unslackened, while his own squadron was dwindling away like a snowball steaming on a hot skillet. If he was going to do it, it had to be now.
One part of him persisted in wondering if there couldn't have been another way to do this thing. If Daghar had simply materialized alongside the Karyu, with no initial attack, spilling its payload of Naga-enhanced warstriders, maybe they could have fought their way into the Ryu-carrier without this, this slaughter.
But the DalRiss ship could not possibly have leaped clear from Alya A to appear alongside the target. They'd had to make the first jump into the system, to a point where Dev could spot Karyu and order the next DalRiss Achiever in line . . . "jump there." And with the Imperials warned by that first jump and already going to battle stations, he'd had to use the Confederation squadron to blunt their defensive fire.
Hadn't he?
Hadn't he?
The problem with that line of thinking was the realization that ordering Eagle and the human squadron into that hellfire had taken precisely the same commitment of will and discipline and judgment as had the order to invest the life, the "soul" of another Achiever.
He was using ships and people the way he would use a tool. The way the DalRiss used their gene-tailored biotechnology, Perceivers, Achievers, and all the rest.
Now he was about to send Katya into that hell, and he didn't even know whether the scheme of piggybacking Nagas to warstriders would work.
He'd thought all along that Xenolinking was like being a god in the scope of new vision, the control, the sheer, vast power of control over mind and matter. The problem was, godlike power conferred godlike responsibility . . . in this case over the lives of his people.
Over Katya's life.
God, what's happened to me? . . .
Chapter 32
No other art is so founded on uncertainties as is the art of war. A lifetime must be put into its preparation, where its exercise takes but a brief while. Experience cannot be g
ained at any time, or from the study of any age, and experience once gained may be put out of date tomorrow.
—The Art of Modern War
Colonel Hermann Foertsch
C.E. 1940
"Now!" Dev's mind screamed. "Jump!"
Daghar vanished from one point in space as an Achiever stretched forth its imagination and will, grasped reality for the first time in its short life . . . and died. The DalRiss ship reappeared in the same instant it had disappeared, a vast, star-shaped mountain that swallowed the warring Karyu in its shadow. Beyond, the blue-black swirl of storm clouds masking the face of Herakles added the reflection of an eerie, twilight glow to the shadowed Imperial warship.
A cavern gaped in Daghar's belly, at a wrinkled twist in its hide where, hours earlier, it had been attached to ShraRish by what could only be described as a tree root, one as thick and as massive as any sequoia. Motes spilled from the cavern, tiny, glittering things that wafted toward Karyu on blue-glowing flickers of magnetic flame, riding the intermeshed lines of force encircling Herakles and the Heraklean sun itself like the currents of a solar wind.
Guided by Dev and his link through Daghar's Naga, the motes hurtled toward the Karyu.
"Go! Go! Go!"
Katya felt herself falling through the night, suspended, momentarily, between the vast, outstretched arms of the Daghar and the elongated, patchwork clutter of armor and turrets and glowing craters that was an Imperial Ryu-carrier. In another instant, the last of the warstriders was clear and Daghar vanished, reappearing as a star in another part of the sky, the span of a fair-sized continent distant.
Point defense lasers whirled and canted, as fire control officers noted this new threat and downloaded targeting data and calculations from the carrier's AI. One battery fired . . . then another, then a dozen more. To left and to right, above and below, Warlords and Fastriders, Swiftstriders and Ghostriders, warstriders by the dozen flared dazzlingly white as outer layers of armor boiled away into space, as the Naga fragments propelling them first charred, then exploded, unable to handle the megawatt torrents of energy slashing through their mix of natural and artificial cells.
Katya returned fire. Neither Kurt Allen nor Ryan Green had much to do for the fall across to the Imperial ship, so each took a different weapon and began blazing away, aiming for PDL turrets, targeting radars and fire control towers.
Halfway across, the Nagas propelling them reversed polarity and began decelerating.
And warstriders continued to die.
There they were.
Vandis had seen the DalRiss ship swim into visibility a kilometer above Karyu's dorsal surface, blotting out the sun. A moment later, he'd seen the sparkle of the warstriders catching the reflected glare of Herakles as they fell, as they died in the fusillade of defensive fire from the carrier's dorsal hull mounts.
Flashing scant meters above Karyu's armored skin, Van downloaded the commands readying both of his EWC-167 payloads. He'd hung on to them during his first pass since he'd needed to see the target to hit it, and he was damned glad now that he had. A cloudscreen, detonated there, might shield the incoming warstriders for a critical few moments. Steady . . .
His Warhawk lurched hard to the left, wobbling out of alignment. Gok! I'm hit!
A spacecraft flashed past at the edge of Van's field of vision; his AI captured the image, enhanced it, identified it: an Se-280 Soritaka, one of the best of the Imperial's frontline interceptors. It was slewing around as it passed, lining up for another shot. . . .
. . . and then it exploded in an eye-searing burst of light and radiant fragments.
"Nailed him!" Jothan Bailey's voice cried. "Three-five! See if you can slip a cloudscreen in—"
"Already on the way!" He delivered the firing command, and a missile bearing an EWC-167 warhead streaked across the convoluted gray landscape, following the targeting guidance he'd fed to its gnat-sized brain moments before.
The warload detonated an instant later, a silent flowering of silver between Karyu's hull and the flame-streaked night.
The flash caught Katya by complete surprise, and for a horrible moment she thought she'd been hit.
Then she recognized the burst for what it was, a cloudscreen detonated between the surviving warstriders and the Karyu. They were moving fast enough that they would be through the screen in seconds, but in combat seconds routinely measured the fleeting interval between life and death. For a handful of heartbeats, the deadly point defense fire was blocked, the beams scattered and reflected by the silver, mirror's sheen of the expanding cloud. Elsewhere in the sky, ships were dying, but for that critical instant nearly two hundred warstriders sheltered behind that screen . . . and lived.
Then she was through the dispersing cloud of motes. The sensation was almost exactly like that of a warstrider air assault, punching through the cloud layer on flaring jetbacks, dropping toward the surface of a planet. The "ground" was rushing up at Katya, filling her view, as her Naga dragged at the invisible fabric of magnetism in surrounding space, slowing her . . . slowing her . . .
Impact!
Katya's Warlord, weightless, but still packing the inertia of a falling, sixty-ton mass, slammed into Karyu's hull with a concussion that jolted Katya and her crew even through their links.
Through the link with her Xeno, Katya gave it orders. That way. Her Warlord skimmed low across the surface beneath a silver sky. She'd seen something that way during her descent, a crater, a gap in the Karyu's armor, a possible gateway to the spacefaring fortress's inner works.
Other warstriders were falling out of the silver canopy on every side. "With me, Rangers!" Katya cried. "Charge!"
Dev could feel himself losing control.
The earlier exhilaration of controlling ten warships and eighty flyers and hundreds of warstriders like extensions of his own body had dwindled away, had vanished, at last, like a half-remembered dream as he'd watched the point defense lasers sweeping Katya's Rangers out of the sky. It had been akin to a juggler with too many balls in the air losing control, watching the balls fall one by one. The relief he'd felt when a fighter's cloudscreen had burst, sheltering the assault group the rest of the way, had been almost overwhelming . . . but it had brought with it an emotion-laden jolt: I should have thought of that! Somehow, he'd neglected to have them supplied for the warstrider assault on the Ryu-carrier. For Katya's assault, and the oversight could have killed her and every striderjack in her team.
No, that wasn't quite correct. He couldn't forget about cloudscreens, not having used them in his spaceborne assault that had taken Eagle from her Japanese masters, and again in his raid at the Imperial shipyard at Athena. They were a basic part of modern space combat tactics, as elementary as radar, and he'd given orders to use them liberally during the approach, to screen the fighters.
What had failed, he feared, was his identification with the men and women occupying the ships and fighters swarming now around the embattled mountain that was Karyu. He'd been thinking of Katya's striders, directed through the Naga link of his symbiosis, as a part of him, something that didn't need protection.
Technomegalomania . . . a feeling that he was invulnerable within the aura of high-tech magic that linked him with organic minds and electronic systems distributed across a thousand kilometers of space. What he'd forgotten was that those motes drifting toward the Karyu were humans. People. Friends.
Damn! He could have killed her! . . .
Elsewhere, the enemy escorts were moving in closer now, and the tide of battle appeared to be swinging around, turning against the Confederation assault force. Rebel was dead. So was the corvette Daring, savaged by repeated hits by lasers, particle beams, and rounds from the carrier's hivel cannons. Constellation was adrift, her engines shut down, her maneuvering system shot to bits, though she continued to blaze away at Karyu and the other Imperial ships with as many batteries as she could bring to bear. Eagle was practically touching the Ryu-carrier, still fighting and moving but with half of her turrets
out of action and a portion of her starboard flank glowing red-hot.
In bloody exchange, one Imperial frigate had been destroyed by a missile salvo launched by Eagle, and a light destroyer had been badly damaged. A light cruiser had tried to come up astern of the Eagle, but a sudden, unexpected barrage from Constellation loosed past the looming, black-and-gray barricade of Karyu's flank had punctured the larger ship's armor in a dozen places and left her powerless, at least for the moment.
And Dev watched over the carnage like a bloody-handed colossus, like a god of war, hurling his people into that sacrificial altar. Enemy fighters were swarming around the beleaguered Karyu now, hunting down the warstriders clinging to her back.
God . . . Katya! . . .
Had his own people become such . . . such faceless tools that he no longer thought of them as flesh and blood? . . .
A Soritaka fighter angled down out of a silver sky rapidly tattering away to star-filled black. Soundlessly, gouts of white fire erupted from the hull-metal ground twenty meters away. "Kurt!" Katya screamed over the strider's ICS. "Nail him!"
"Tracking!"
The Warlord's dorsal hivel cannon pivoted, and Katya sensed the vibration of its buzz saw fire . . .
. . . and then the fighter was past them, its wings aglow in sunlight. A missile detonated, and shrapnel slapped off the hull of Katya's warstrider. A second fighter flashed in the sunlight . . . a third . . . a fourth.
"Damn it, they're too fast!" Kurt yelled. "And there's too many of them. Here comes another! . . ."
God, Karyu's whole damned fighter wing must be out here, picking off the warstriders like vermin. Another silent explosion, and Hari Sebree was screaming wildly in her mind's ear, a rasping wail of sheer agony . . . and then his stricken Scoutstrider ruptured in a glowing sphere of hot gas and fragments.
The gap in Karyu's hull yawned a hundred meters ahead, a tunnel, a cavern yawning into the carrier's vitals. Katya exerted her will through the Naga and streaked across broken and flame-streaked metal toward its shelter.
