Warstrider: Symbionts (Warstrider Series, Book Four)

by Ian Douglas

  The fleet, designated Ohka Squadron, consisted of nineteen warships ranging in size from eight-hundred–ton Hari-class corvettes to the flagship, a Ryu-class carrier, massing two million tons and just short of one thousand meters in length. Nudged by brief flashes from maneuvering jets, the armada deployed, the ships spreading out across six thousand kilometers of empty space. Blocks of data flickered and shifted next to the images of the various ships, information telling of vectors, relative velocities, and combat readiness.

  The scene, portrayed through virtual reality, was being experienced by a number of observers, an invisible gallery of onlookers whose vantage point shifted back and forth among three of those orbiting Imperial warships. They included captains and department heads from several vessels; senior was Chujo Takeshi Miyagi, commander in chief of Otori Squadron. Among the watchers was the bright and tactically innovative Shosho Tomiji Kima, commanding officer of the flagship Karyu, the Fire Dragon. Kima had been Karyu's Executive Officer under Miyagi until eight months ago, when Miyagi had been promoted to full admiral and given command of Otori Squadron.

  "At this point," a voice was telling the watchers in Nihongo, "the Ryu-class carrier and two of the cruisers have already begun their bombardment of the rebel position on the planet's surface. So far, there is no response from the enemy on the ground."

  Kima studied the data displays carefully, encoding ship positions and deployments within his personal RAM for future study on his own. Later, too, he would examine in detail the disposition of the squadron's marine warstriders and infantry on the surface. This ViRsimulation would be restricted to the battle, if such it could be called, fought in orbit over Herakles some four months earlier.

  One of the ships, he noticed, one of the four big Kako-class cruisers, was in trouble.

  "It was at this point that something went badly wrong," the voice continued. The speaker, Kima knew, was Shosa Chokugen Takaji, the fleet's senior military intelligence specialist. "We believe that the rebels were able somehow to take over Mogami's engineering AIs and instigate a quantum power tap start-up."

  "I don't understand, Shosasan," another voice said. "How could turning on a QPT be considered a weapon?"

  "Obviously, Imadasan," Admiral Miyagi said, replying for the shosa, "you xenosophontologists are taught nothing about starship engineering or power core operation." A ripple of polite laughter sounded from the other unseen watchers.

  "Quite so," the intelligence officer said. "The QPT uses paired, artificially generated microsingularities to extract energy from the quantum plenum. These are molecule-sized black holes orbiting one another at speeds approaching that of light, and with mutual, finely tuned harmonic resonances. They are rarely used in close proximity to a planet, since local gravity fields distort the shape of space and can affect that harmonic tuning. Somehow, we presume through one of our own communications bands, someone on the surface linked with Mogami's AI, started up the power tap, and then ordered the computer to shut down. Without the computer to tune the singularities' harmonics from microsecond to microsecond within a gravitational well, they went random and initiated an uncontrolled power cascade. One evaporated in a burst of energy. Note the readings there on the right. Intense X rays and gamma radiation are flooding Mogami's engineering spaces."

  Indeed, the readings taken from a nearby ship had gone off the scale. A schematic diagram drew itself in an empty patch of space nearby, sketching in the interior spaces of the six-hundred-meter cigar that was Mogami. The observers watched as the cruiser's engineering decks began crumpling inward, the pace of the vessel's destruction slowed to a fraction of its realtime pace.

  Implacably, the voice continued, describing the cruiser's death. "With the evaporation of one microsingularity, of course, the second was flung clear in a gravitational slingshot effect at relativistic speeds. It was moving more slowly by the time it left the ship. Repeated interactions with Mogami's interior structure slowed it significantly as it passed along the cruiser's length, devouring armor, hull metal, bulkheads, circuitry, crew members, and anything else that happened to lie in its path before emerging . . . there."

  Mogami and its transparent cutaway view both were crumpling as the observers watched, the one a mirror to the other. A dazzling point of light emerged from just behind the ship's bow, streaking outward. An instant later it, too, evaporated and vanished into the depths of space in a nova's glare of visible light and hard radiation that silently washed across the hulls of every ship in the Imperial squadron.

  "Many of the ships sustained lethal damage at this point," the admiral's voice went on, emotionless. "The micro black hole's explosive evaporation must have been equivalent to the simultaneous detonation of some thousands of nuclear warheads. EMP and radiation damage crippled at least half the ships and inflicted thousands of casualties.

  "Admiral Kawashima recognized what was happening, of course, and shut down all external communications links. The rebels were unable to directly influence any more of our shipboard AIs. As a result, they almost immediately changed tactics. Please keep your attention focused on the planet."

  The face of the world, half-full, was changing.

  The transformation was so rapid that Kima was not at first sure what he was seeing. At a point not far from the equator, clouds were gathering in a great, spiraling whorl, moving so quickly that even from synchorbit their movement could be seen by the naked eye as a slow, writhing crawl. Under extreme magnification and image enhancement, they took on a distinctly three-dimensional aspect, each tiny thunderhead edged by its own shadow. Where seconds before perhaps half of the planet's seas and barren stretches of land and ice cap were visible, new clouds were appearing, puffing up out of nothing, crowding together, deepening, quickening, building a hurricane that spanned a quarter of the planet's visible disk as Kima watched.

  At the heart of that eerie, titanic storm, lightnings pulsed and throbbed, like a heartbeat cast in light to make it visible, each silent flicker muffled and diffused by the masking clouds. Near Herakles's north pole, a thin smear of pale, wavering light just visible against that portion of the polar zone in darkness faded, then winked out almost magically. Data flickered and shifted in the overlaid information displays.

  Abruptly, something happened . . . a flicker of motion, a flash of light. Those in the audience could not be sure exactly what, if anything, they'd just seen. New blocks of data wrote themselves across parts of the display, registering events invisible to human senses.

  "That first shot missed," the admiral said. "I'll have the simulation AI play the next one at a reduced speed. Time factor five to one."

  It happened again, but this time slowly enough that the watchers could perceive a thread of intensely brilliant, blue-white light streaking up from the precise center of that whirlpool of clouds, a point marked by a tiny hole, the storm's eye. The thread drew itself skyward, razor crisp, laser-beam straight, detaching itself from the planet slowly at first, then spearing into the midst of the Imperial fleet with an apparent acceleration, an illusion created by perspective.

  "Time factor one thousand to one."

  The movement slowed again, sharply. The thread became a tiny, fiercely radiating star drifting rapidly upward through empty space, targeted precisely on the heavy cruiser Zintu, sister to Mogami.

  The imagery obviously had been captured at the extreme limit of those sensors recording the event, but the resolving power was good enough to record in detail the explosion unfolding like a blossoming flower, a blinding dazzle of actinic violence that briefly outshone the glare of Mu Herculis itself. Zintu simply vanished, her enormous, cylindrical bulk converted in an instant into that glare of raw energy . . . plus a few hurtling scraps of twisted and half-molten debris flung clear by that rapidly expanding wave front. Other ships nearby, a frigate and a small destroyer, were lightly brushed by Zintu's flowering, a caress that boiled away hull metal and armor, turrets and fairings, and left both vessels lifeless, blast-tortured wrecks.

/>   "Kuso," someone in the audience said quietly, almost reverently.

  "The missile," the admiral continued as though he'd not heard, "was analyzed spectroscopically. It was nothing more than a block of nanofactured fabricrete and iron massing approximately one metric ton, accelerated to a velocity of over ten percent of the speed of light and glowing partly from the friction of its passage through the Heraklean atmosphere, and partly from the play of incredible energies across its surface. We believe it was part of the outer shell of one of the atmosphere generating units on Herakles's surface. After traversing the thirty thousand kilometers between the ground and Zintu in nine-tenths of one second, it struck the cruiser amidships. We calculate that the transitional kinetic energy liberated by that impact was somewhere between 1019 and 1020 joules, or some one thousand times the yield of a twentymegaton thermonuclear warhead. It appears, gentlemen, that the rebels have found a dramatic means of overcoming their lack of nuclear weaponry."

  There was an uncomfortable stir among the watchers, and Kima heard the murmur of urgent, low-voiced exchanges among them. The Imperium had long maintained its military superiority over the Shichiju through the simple expedient of being the only one of the Hegemony's member states permitted through the government's charter to possess nuclear weapons. There were rumors that the rebels were working on developing such weapons for themselves. With this demonstration at Herakles, perhaps they no longer needed them.

  The physics of that demonstration bothered Kima, however.

  "The energy required to accelerate a one-ton mass to thirty-some thousand kilometers per second," Kima pointed out, "must be nothing less than astronomical. . . ."

  "Nothing less, Shoshosan" Miyagi replied, the words dry.

  "But where could they get such power? Or . . . have they found a means of creating a quantum power tap on the planet's surface?"

  "Unlikely, Shoshosan. Such installations are extremely large and require enormous technical staffs, assets that we do not believe the rebels possess." The admiral gave a command, restoring the normal one-to-one time factor of the scene.

  Once again, there was a flicker of motion, a flash of light. This time the target was one of the squadron's outrider ships, a destroyer positioned to intercept fleeing rebel ships some half a million kilometers farther out.

  At that distance, the hurtling missile took an agony of time, more than fifteen seconds, to reach the target. The destroyer Urakaze, suddenly aware of its danger, engaged its main drives in a desperate attempt to step aside. Unfortunately, the huge ship was moving tail-first toward the planet, having just completed its deceleration from the outer system; it took precious seconds to bring its fusion drives on line, precious seconds more simply to kill the last of its planetward velocity . . . and whoever was aiming those rocks had clearly anticipated the Imperial warship's attempt at escape.

  The missile struck Urakaze's stern directly between its paired, glowing venturis, and the destroyer vanished in a silent nova's flare of light.

  "Note the fact," the admiral continued, "that Herakles's magnetic field has vanished. The event registered on our sensors, of course, and in the disappearance of the planet's aurorae. Our scientists are unable to explain the mechanism, though it strongly suggests that the Heraklean Xenophobe is behind the phenomenon. We know Xenophobes make extensive use of magnetic fields. They generate an intense, highly localized field, for example, that actually changes the structure of rock by rearranging its constituent atoms. That's how they're able to tunnel through solid rock at relatively high speeds. Presumably, the Heraklean Xenophobe somehow tapped the planetary magnetic field and used the energy to launch those boulders. Since Xenophobes are thermovores, it undoubtedly also directly utilized the heat of the planet's core, though we had no way of measuring that."

  The next shot to come streaking up out of the eye of the storm struck Ohka Squadron's flagship, Donryu. Its kilometer-long, gun-bristling length resisted the inconceivable energies of the high-speed missile no better than had the hull of the far smaller Urakaze.

  "Such power," someone in the audience said.

  "Such power can be countered," Miyagi said curtly. "Ideally, it can be turned against itself, in the best traditions of the martial arts."

  "But how can such a weapon be resisted?" one of the watchers asked. Kima thought that the voice was that of the xenosophontologist who'd asked about QPTs earlier. His name was Imada, and he was a civilian, a scientist attached to the Imperial Sekkodan, or scout service.

  "In this case, by making a preemptive strike with irresistible weapons of our own," Miyagi said. "That, however, is not our primary problem. The Emperor, gentlemen, is troubled by reports that the rebels have managed to ally themselves with the Xenophobe. Clearly, the control these creatures have over the physical environment gives them awesome power and makes them a threat wherever they may be encountered. It is the Imperial Staff Command's belief that they will pose a threat only on worlds already occupied by a Xenophobe, worlds such as Mu Herculis, and these, fortunately, are rare.

  "Still, the possibility remains that this rebel Confederation will learn how to seed other worlds with Xenophobes, with Xenophobe 'buds,' rather, from organisms that they have communicated with. They might learn how to employ Xenophobe fragments aboard their ships or use them as a kind of infestation introduced onto worlds that we control. At Herakles, we've all seen how deadly this alliance of Man and Xenophobe can be."

  "Sir . . ."

  "Yes, Taisa Urabe."

  Urabe was captain of the cruiser Kuma, a dour and phlegmatic man. "Sir, if the rebels have achieved some sort of alliance with the Xenophobe, isn't, I mean, wouldn't it be better to let the rebels go their way?"

  "Neboken-ja nayo?" Miyagi snapped. Literally, the phrase meant "Aren't you half-asleep?" and, depending on the tone, could be humorous or harsh. The admiral used the words like a whiplash, chastising. "Our new Emperor has determined that the rebels must be brought back into the fold," Miyagi continued. "If we fail—and I must stress that the responsibility is upon us, upon the men and ships of this squadron—if we fail, we invite the rule of Earth and the Empire by the half-civilized shiro of the Frontier."

  A deathly silence hung among the virtual presences gathered within the electronic conference space. The word shiro meant "white" but could be construed as "white boy," as much an epithet as "nigger" was to a black. Miyagi, Kima knew, was part of the inner circle of high-ranking military officers within the Imperial Staff Command who were determined to eliminate gaijin influence from all levels of the Imperial government and military . . . and from the subsidiary government of the Terran Hegemony as well, if possible. He hated gaijin with a passion, and Kima was pretty sure that that was why the man had been chosen to command this mission.

  "I apologize," Urabe said. "It was certainly not my intent to question the Imperial will."

  "Of course not," Miyagi said, the words softer now. "And I understand that you all have been under considerable strain, preparing for this mission. Remember, however, that the Emperor and his senior people, including Gensui Munimori and the entire Imperial Staff Command, are watching us with the most exacting scrutiny. We cannot fail. To do so could encourage the rebellion's supporters on fifty worlds and fan the flames of insurrection to a blaze that we could never contain or extinguish. The rebel weapon is a fearsome one, yes, but the mission planners and our colleagues with Imperial Intelligence are certain that this operation, if carried out precisely according to plan, will allow us to avoid the destruction suffered by Ohka Squadron. Instead, the Heraklean Xenophobe will be destroyed, together with the so-called rebel government and whatever scraps of disaffected Hegemony deserters they may have assembled there. We will strike without warning and without mercy. The Rebellion, gentlemen, will be crushed with this single blow, once and for all."

  From the way he launched into the speech, Kima wondered if Miyagi might not actually have been waiting for Urabe's statement, and the chance to demonstrate, with his outbur
st, the importance of victory.

  Whether the outburst had been arranged or not, Kima agreed with the reasoning behind it. The rebel challenge to the order and stability of the Hegemony—and behind the Hegemony, of Dai Nihon's Imperium—could not be permitted to stand, not without crippling the government's effectiveness forever. If the rebels won, the future promised to be a howling darkness, as the barbarians assaulted the rational order of the Empire.

  As commanding officer of the Karyu, he'd been personally involved in the drafting of the squadron's operational orders, and knew the plan was a good one, with a good chance of success. Still, Kima's military experience had taught him to be cautious about confidence in any venture with as many unknowns as this one, however. No plan survives contact with the enemy. Who had said that? A Western strategist, he was sure. And the Western-descended inhabitants of the Frontier had more than once demonstrated the truth of that axiom.

  He would not feel truly confident until the Imperial fleet's first blow had fallen. That blow would be irresistible, deadly . . . and inescapable, no matter how close their alliance with the world's damnable black Xenophobe.

  After that blow had fallen, the rebels would have no chance for survival whatsoever.

  Chapter 12

  The true test of man lies in space travel . . . not in the mastery of the technology that makes it physically possible, but in the mastery of self and mind and imagination that bridges the psychological gulf that for so long isolated Man on the world of his birth. It was this mastery of self that gave us the stars, far more than the mastery of such purely physical systems as the Power Tap and the K-T drive.

  —Man and His Works

  Karl Gunther Fielding

  C.E. 2488

  If I'm not careful, Dev thought, late one shipboard evening as he climbed out of a comm module on Eagle's recreation deck after another session with the AI monitor, I'll be interfacing with AI software more than I am with human beings.