Battlemind

by William H. Keith

  From what the DalRiss had been able to gather, the Web had employed a different strategy at the DalRiss sun, with hundreds of thousands of Webbers appearing out of empty space and plunging straight into the sun… and within a few days, triggering the nova that had eradicated the entire system.

  Why the difference? Did it have to do with the defense that the locals put up? Or had Web strategy changed in the millennia since they’d scorched the Gr’tak homeworld? As he studied the purple cloud projected into the ops center battle tank, Dev could already detect a faint shift in the cloud’s shape as it paired itself into two lobes. If it followed the pattern seen at the Gr’tak home system, the cloud would soon be two separate, smaller clouds, one heading for Earth, the other aimed at the Sun.

  Dev felt a throbbing, urgent restlessness that swiftly grew into barely contained panic; he’d been an electronic download for close to three decades now… and before that his allegiance had been to the Confederation. If he ever thought of himself as having a home world any more, that world was New America; 26 Draconis IV had been both the spiritual and material focus for the rebellion against Empire and Hegemony in the first place.

  But Dev had been born on Earth, and his roots were there, on Man’s original homeworld. He’d been born and raised in the Scranton District of the big, sprawling, eastern seaboard metropolis of the North American Protectorate. His mother still lived there, though he hadn’t seen her for many years; his brother Greg… now there was someone he’d not thought of in a while! Greg had been in Imperial service thirty years ago; God alone knew where he was now. It was possible, even likely, that he was back on Earth again.

  And Earth was about to be destroyed when her sun was artificially detonated by the Web.

  Though he’d thought little about Earth for a long time, Dev found that the knowledge hurt, and hurt badly. He could remember talks with his father in a West Scranton park… remember long walks in the hills outside of the city wards… remember, now that he called the sensations to mind, even the taste of the air after a spring rain, the laughter of children playing in the street, the caress of a breeze on his face.

  It was harshly, bitterly ironic. At the time, he’d wanted nothing more and nothing less than to get off of Earth and never go back. His father had been in Imperial service, one of a handful of gaijin at that time allowed to transfer from Hegemony service to the Imperial Navy; he’d been required to divorce Dev’s mother, however, as part of the political price of his advancement. He’d accepted, because only that way could he continue supporting his wife and sons, who lived in one of the more savagely depressed economic zones of the Earth.

  Later, though, his father had been disgraced… and Dev had pulled all the strings he could to get off of Earth and start his life over somewhere, anywhere else. That determination had led him eventually to Loki, and to his joining the Hegemony military, where he’d become a warstrider.

  Never, never in his wildest imaginings in all of the years since had he thought he would ever feel either sorrow or nostalgia for the planet that had given him birth. But he did.…

  Dev felt himself a part of humanity in that moment as he had never felt it before; the loss Mankind as a whole would know with the loss of Earth and her teeming billions would sear the consciousness of the survivors, would traumatize the entire race in ways that simply could not be predicted. Is this what the DalRiss felt when their worlds were destroyed? Dev wondered. Can we survive such a loss? DalRiss psychology was so alien from that of humans that it was difficult to compare the reactions of the two to the same event.

  With a sense of deep regret, he pulled out of Yamato’s computer network and returned to the Earth-Moon system, this time to an Imperial Combat Command Center at Aristarchus, on Luna. The base, named Hachiman after the ancient Japanese god of war, was the central control node for a farflung subsystem of the Imperial Terran military C3 network, Command, Control, and Communications. There, he checked again on the Imperial assets in-system—a pathetically small force when compared to the numbers arrayed against it. Besides the Ida-Ten squadron, there were a half-dozen other ryu-class warflyer carriers in-system, four at Earth frantically preparing to leave dock and move into position, the other two already accelerating at full blast toward a rendezvous with Yamato and the others. Perhaps a hundred warships more, ranging from a few heavy cruisers to numerous frigates and patrol vessels, were under thrust now, all moving toward the same fateful rendezvous near the orbit of Jupiter, some five a.u.s out from Sol.

  Other squadrons, he saw, were being called in from distant star systems, but since the only way to move instantaneously between the stars was as a rider within one of the huge DalRiss city ships, it was clearly going to take time to organize and transport any out-system reinforcements. Everything—every hope of victory—would depend on whether Admiral Kurebayashi’s little squadron could slow the cloud long enough to enable other forces to reach Sol in time; Dev had already taken a hard and realistic look at the odds and decided that Kurebayashi would not slow the Web’s advance by so much as a millisecond. The Web machines would overwhelm Yamato and the other Imperial warships in moments. Most of the Webbers would stream right past without even slowing, and there was nothing that Yamato or any other ship in the Solar System could do about it.

  While occupying Hachiman, Dev tried once again to reach the Overmind. Damn it, he could feel it stirring, like a vast, dark movement within the unimaginably deep and murky waters of the virtual sea around him. But Dev could not reach it… could not even conceive of a way to try to attract its attention. Had he not seen it in action at Nova Aquila, he would have dismissed it now, for it was less an independent pattern of thought and purpose than a dull, rumbling cacophony of countless minds and thoughts, blind and purposeless. Trying to contact such a ponderous and insensible collection of chaotic inertia was like shouting into a hurricane, attempting to challenge the wind and lightning themselves.

  Conceding failure at last, Dev accessed an online image of Earth as seen high in the Lunar sky over Hachiman, a blue half-globe a swirl with dazzling white. Earth as humans had seen it for six hundred years now, frail and delicate in the night.

  And he knew that there was nothing he could do to stop the apocalypse that was swiftly descending on it with implacable, ruthless resolve.

  Chapter 15

  One must not always use the same modes of operation against the enemy, even though they seem to be working out successfully. Often enough the enemy will become used to them, adapt to them, and inflict disaster on us.

  —The Strategicon

  THE EMPEROR MAURICE

  C.E. 600

  “We can’t assemble a fleet quickly enough,” Katya said grimly. “We have five DalRiss cityships here at New America now, and four of them are with the Imperial squadron. They’ll be moving out-system, back to defend Sol, any moment now.”

  “The majority of the cityships are still at High Frontier,” Dev pointed out. He had rejoined the others in the virtual representation of Cascadia, to find that Gresham had left the meeting during his absence, leaving Vic and Katya, Kara, Daren and Taki… now truly a family gathering. “Or with the Unified Fleet, at Nova Aquila. Most of them are redeploying too.”

  “I imagine the Imperials there will be scrambling to get their task force back to Sol, and tagging every DalRiss they can find,” Kara said. Tagging was the term used in the Confederation to refer to convincing a DalRiss cityship to carry a vessel from one star system to another. The idea had taken a while to catch on only because it was difficult to figure out what the DalRiss might want in exchange for the service. Lately, DalRiss ships had been very much in demand for fast transport… and the astonishing thing was that they did not expect payment for this very real service that they performed.

  What Dev had learned in his twenty-five years-plus of living and working with the beings—and what most other humans seemed to have a lot of trouble understanding—was that the DalRiss saw such service as their part in what the
y called the “Dance of Life,” a way of participating in the society that had become theirs when the Web had turned their home stars into novae.

  “I’ve often wondered,” Vic said with a tight smile, “what would happen if things came down to war between Empire and Confederation again. Both sides use the DalRiss for fast transport now. Would they both try to corner the market in available DalRiss ships? Or get the DalRiss to fire at their friends who happened to’ve been tagged by the other side?”

  “The reason the DalRiss never seem to take sides,” Dev told them, “is that, frankly, they have a lot of difficulty telling the difference between us and the Japanese. They never had anything like intraspecies warfare in their history, and they really have trouble understanding it in us.”

  “So they just offer a ride to anyone who asks, is that it?” Daren said.

  “That’s about it,” Vic said.

  “You really think Earth is going to get blown away?” Daren asked. He wore a faint smile.

  “I don’t see what can stop it,” Dev said. “The same thing is happening there that happened at Alya. Or the Gr’tak world.”

  “That should solve the Confederation’s problems with the Empire, at any rate, huh?”

  “It’s a damned high price to pay,” Katya said sharply. “My God, Dev, there’s got to be something! What about the Overmind?”

  “I’ve tried,” Dev said. “I’ve tried to reach it. I’m pretty sure it’s there. I can sense… something, something very large, very powerful, but it’s way down deep and completely nonresponsive, near as I can tell.”

  “Maybe all you’re sensing is the potential of the thing,” Taki said.

  “Sure,” Daren added. “It’ll wake up when Nakamura’s Number of humans link in.”

  “Maybe.” Dev wasn’t convinced of that at all. For one thing, he was pretty sure that there’d been something like Nakamura’s Number of people linked in during the time he’d been back in the Solar System. The quickening pace of the communications crisscrossing back and forth on the Net suggested vast numbers of humanity linking in from every system in the Shichiju.

  Still, when the Overmind had awakened during the Battle of Nova Aquila, Dev had received an unexpected and stunning look into the network’s mind and experienced some small part of its power, scope, and reach. Nakamura’s Number, a specific number of nodal interconnections and linkages that defined a specific “critical mass” of complexity above which a transcendental change took place, was more flexible as a concept, he knew now, than its mathematical nature might suggest. That number could have been changed by a factor of ten either way and it might not have affected the outcome… or the outcome could have been completely different. Humans had a long way to go in their understanding of what mind and consciousness were, and their stubborn reliance on numbers and rigid categories still gave them comfort in the face of the unknown.

  “1 don’t think we can rely on the Overmind,” Dev continued after a moment. “It’s more like a natural force, a hurricane spawned by warm oceans and tropical weather patterns, than an ally.”

  “We haven’t even been able to verify its existence,” Taki put in, “save as a purely subjective phenomenon during the fight at Nova Aquila.”

  “Something took out the Web Alphas,” Kara replied, referring to the planetoid-sized machine-ships the Web had used to coordinate their massive fleet’s actions. “It wasn’t our Combined Fleet that did it, that’s for sure.”

  “The Overmind is real,” Dev said. “It was then. It is now.”

  “Sure,” Daren said with a grin. “But how real are you?”

  The statement, Dev thought, had been intended as a joke, but it hurt nonetheless. He was surprised at how much it hurt.

  “Unless we can find a way to stop the Web assault, Earth’s sun will go nova in a few more days,” he said with a hard curtness to the words. “We can assume that the Web will continue to search for human-occupied systems and destroy those as well.”

  “How the hell did it find Earth?” Vic wanted to know.

  Dev sighed. “Ultimately, of course, that was my fault,” he said. He’d been the one who’d first probed the Aquilan Stargate with a downloaded copy of himself… and that copy, together with everything he’d known, had been lost to the Web in the Galactic Core.

  “But we countered that,” Kara said. “Operation Shell Game.”

  “Obviously they saw through that,” Dev replied. “1 don’t know how. For all we know, they were able to separate fact from fiction from the beginning, just because they’re the ones who created the Naga in the first place, and know how they work better than we do.”

  “If that’s true,” Katya said gently, “I don’t think they would have waited two years before attacking Earth. Shell Game bought us time. It just would have been nice if it had bought us more time. Like maybe a century or three.”

  “Most likely,” Vic said, “they ran some sort of a program on all of the information they picked up from our probes, comparing that data with what they knew about the Galaxy already. The information we downloaded into the Naga fragments wasn’t all that complete. It couldn’t be. Maybe they were able to pick up a difference in, well, in the texture of the information. Or there were little mistakes in star positions or alignments that we didn’t catch.”

  “It’s also possible they analyzed our EM shell,” Taki pointed out. “Man’s EM shell, I mean. It’s got a radius of, what? Six hundred light years now. That’s halfway to Nova Aquila already. And that shell is centered on Sol, because none of the colonies, even the oldest, like Chiron and New Earth, have been broadcasting on electromagnetic frequencies for anything near that long. All of their radio bubbles are submerged inside Earth’s. If the Web has listening posts or another stargate closer to the Shichiju, within six light centuries of Earth, they could figure out where we were just for that.”

  “That’s right!” Katya said. She looked at Dev’s virtual image. “That’s very right! I don’t think anything else would explain how they could pinpoint Earth’s solar system so precisely.”

  Dev rolled the idea about in his thoughts for a moment. He’d not considered that possibility, assuming, as he had, that his inadvertent first contact with the Web had been what had given the game away in the first place. “In the long run,” he said slowly, “it doesn’t really matter how they found Earth, does it? They have. We’ve been afraid that they would for two years now, ever since they found the Alyan worlds and destroyed them.”

  And that, he realized, was a part of his own pain. The DalRiss had lost their homeworld and its nearby colony as a direct result of that catastrophic first meeting, and he’d long felt guilty about the fact, even though the DalRiss themselves, though jolted by the experience, seemed to have accepted it as yet another step in their mysterious Dance of Life.

  Their outlook on events, on such outwardly simple matters as cause and effect, was markedly different from that of humans.

  “One way or another,” he continued with only the slightest of pauses, “they’ve found Sol. And if we don’t do something damned fast, we’re going to lose Earth the same way the DalRiss and the Gr’tak lost their worlds.” He gave Daren a hard look. “Believe me, son. That loss is going to hit us gokking hard.”

  Katya closed her eyes. “Everything we’ve fought for. Wiped away.”

  Taki shook her head. “Independence from the Empire’s not such a big deal when we start talking about survival as a species.”

  “Well, damn it,” Kara said, her fist clenched and raised above her lap with a small, defiant jerk. “I’m not ready to surrender to the Impies yet. Let’s just see what happens, okay?”

  “There doesn’t seem to be a lot else we can do,” Dev agreed.

  Certainly, there was little more to be said. Dev took his leave of the others, then repeated his earlier electronic passage from 26 Draconis to Sol.

  Five hours had passed since he’d been there before, and the forces still had not come together. Space battles
, by virtue of the incredible distances involved, tended to be long, drawn-out affairs of maneuver capped by a few seconds of stark, extremely destructive violence. The Web swarms—there were now clearly three separate clouds on slightly divergent courses—had the potentially disastrous advantage. Able to accelerate at hundreds of gravities, they could achieve velocities of thousands of kilometers per second in a space of hours or even minutes; the Imperial ships, limited both by engineering and by the frailties of the flesh and blood they carried, could not push much higher than five Gs for the smaller vessels, three for the larger. Once the ryus were close enough to disgorge their squadrons of warflyers, of course, they would win back some of the difference, though not all. Manned warflyers could manage perhaps ten Gs before their pilots blacked out, and teleoperated flyers didn’t need to restrict themselves to the limitations of human pilots. Even so, the best and most powerful flyer could not pull much more than forty to fifty Gs and would be at a significant disadvantage when facing the Web machines.

  With their vast speed, the Web machines had closed much of the gap between where they’d entered the Solar System and the current position of Battlegroup Ida-Ten. Kurebayashi’s squadron had continued accelerating out-system until it was clear that the Web cloud’s velocity would swiftly close the dwindling distance between them, then take the cloud sweeping past the Imperial ships and on into the inner system. The Imperial vessels had spun end over end, then, and began decelerating hard at three Gs.

  Dev had just arrived at the Hachiman facility when I2C-relayed images and information began flooding back down the communications lines from Kurebayashi’s squadron, carrying details of vector, speed, and weapons readiness. The divergence between the three separate Web groups was no more than a few thousand kilometers, if that, but a projection of their separate courses suggested that one was heading for Earth, a second toward Kasei—old Mars—and the third toward the Sun.