Warstrider: Symbionts (Warstrider Series, Book Four)

by Ian Douglas

  "Seven-two, Seven-five, Eight-one, this is Thunderhead," Duryea's voice said. "Divert to three-one-five at plus zero-one-one. Give us a close-up on target Tango-one-niner."

  "Roger that, Thunderhead. Seven-two breaking left and high. I've got Tango-one-niner locked in and on approach."

  "Nest, this is Eight-one. I copy. Locked in and on approach."

  "Probe Seven-five, Seven-five, this is Thunderhead. Do you copy?"

  "Nest, Seven-five! I've got three India-Romeos vectoring in! Don't know if I can dodge 'em!"

  "Seven-five, Thunderhead, we copy. Maintain full Gs and pitch right to zero-five-one at plus zero-seven-three."

  "Nest, Seven-five! I can't get clear! They're on me! I can't! . . ."

  "Probe Seven-five destroyed," the sonorous and unhurried voice of Eagle's AI announced. Two light seconds away, one of the probes had just been smashed from the sky, while somewhere aboard one of the Confederation ships, a probe jacker, severed from his mount, was blinking awake inside a ViRcom module. Dev checked the tally list and saw that twenty-eight of the remote probes had already been lost.

  But the Battle Ops rundown on the Imperial fleet was complete. In another fifteen minutes, the second group of probes, decelerating now to velocities of only a few kilometers per second, would reach ShraRish and begin mapping that world in exacting detail. The rest had either sailed past ShraRish and the Imperial squadron and were already out of the battle, or they were attempting to change their combat roles, from surveillance drones to antiship missiles.

  The chances of one of the remote drones scoring a hit were slender. At the RD-40s' incredible closing velocities, their pilots could do little more than point their steeds in the general direction of an enemy target and hope for the best. They had little in the way of lateral maneuverability, and the four-second reaction time between the moment a probe's scanners detected something in its path and the instant its pilot's commands reached it made fine course adjustments or complex maneuvers useless. After boosting across over half a million kilometers at 50 Gs they were low on reaction mass as well, which meant that when their containment fields collapsed, the resultant plasma detonation delivered little more than the kick of a fair-sized warhead of conventional high explosives.

  Despite all of that, Probe Three-three managed to close with the Asagiri, coming in on the light destroyer nearly broadside-on. Listening to the symphony of mathematics and intercept plots singing in his brain, the jacker waited until the probe was some twelve hundred kilometers from the target before triggering the craft's drive; two seconds later and six hundred thousand kilometers away, Probe Three-three flashed into plasma as hot as the core of a small sun.

  The strike was, as it turned out, a near miss, the explosion flaring briefly against the blackness of space twelve kilometers short of the destroyer's hull. Considering the distances and speeds involved, that was pinpoint accuracy indeed. The expanding plasma cloud and a clutter of molten debris slammed into Asagiri's ventral side starboard a fraction of a second later.

  Any kind of debris moving at a relative velocity of better than six hundred kilometers per second is a terrifying weapon in space. Fortunately for Asagiri, the debris cloud was expanding; much of it missed entirely, most of the surviving bits were wiped from existence by the flash of automated point defense lasers, and only a few grams of solid material actually struck home. Still, the kinetic energy of those flecks of debris was great enough that the destroyer's hull was breached. Atmosphere spilled into space, along with some furniture and several charred bodies from her crew's mess, but the leak was swiftly sealed off by automatics, and, in any case, the shipjackers aboard were securely enclosed within their pressurized link modules, safe from all but a direct hit on Asagiri's heavily armored core stations. The damage was not severe enough to cripple her. A power conduit was broken, a control circuit melted, but redundant backup systems kicked in and, for the moment at least, no serious damage registered within the damage control subroutine of Asagiri's onboard AI.

  Lagging behind the faster ships of the Confederation squadron, the converted hydrogen tanker Tarazed could only manage 2 Gs, and so she maintained station with the equally slow transport Vindemiatrix, well astern of Eagle and the more powerful, more maneuverable warships.

  Tarazed was constructed as five huge spheres strung together like pearls in a necklace between a tiny command module and the boxlike complexity of her fusion drive. The lead sphere had been remodeled to carry cargo and passengers; specifically, it housed the hangar decks and maintenance bays of the 1st Confederation Air/Space Wing, recently nicknamed the Bluestars.

  Though acceleration dragged at him, making his lean, seventy kilos' mass feel like a leaden one-sixty, Sublieutenant Nevin Vandis—Van to his friends—took a final walk-around, giving his warflyer a final exterior inspection. He wasn't entirely sure what he would do if he found something that would warrant a downgrudge on the ugly little ship; he was sure he wouldn't report it. A story popular with members of his squadron was that of Lieutenant Ben Skarbeck, an ascraft fighter pilot who, during the defense of New America, had found his number one cryo-H tank holed by a bit of shrapnel just as the alert sounded for another incoming wave of Imperial fighters. According to the story, which had already assumed mythic proportions, Skarbeck had plugged the hole with the wad of chewing gum that always seemed to be working its way around between his cheek and his gums, fueled up his ship, and launched in time to down two Imperial Ko-125 Akuma attack craft and one Se-280 interceptor.

  Van chewed gum as well—it seemed to be part of the persona of front line fighterjacks when they weren't linked to their steeds—but he wasn't convinced that the Skarbeck story was true and didn't really want to test the idea in combat. Most substances became uncompromisingly brittle when subjected to the temperatures and pressures required to store cryogenic slush hydrogen, and he frankly doubted that a mix of chewing gum and saliva had the chemical or physical properties of, say, the nanolayered polyduraplas sheathing the inside of his flyer's cryo-H tanks.

  Vandis was typical of the fleet's small contingent of fighter pilots, which meant he knew he was the best of the best, the top of the link-jacked military hierarchy that ran from space fighterjacks like himself down to the mud-slogging leggers at the bottom. He'd started out five years earlier as a warstrider with the Newamie militia; his skill with finely detailed linking had qualified him as an ascraft fighter pilot, and he'd flown both I-20 Shorishahs and I-32 Sensokanazuchis for New America's Hegemony government until the rebellion had forced him to choose between the rule of distant Earth or the more immediate and representative government of rebel New America. In point of fact, he cared little about politics one way or the other, though he was well aware that the war had already had one profound impact on his life. More than anything else he loved to fly, and since he'd been assigned to the Bluestars' 3rd Squadron, he'd done very little else. Even during the long periods when Tarazed was isolated in K-T space, Van and his yujos in the squadron flew endlessly in simulations, jacked into their fighters and living the fantasies fed to their brains by the ship's combat AI.

  "Hey, Lieutenant!" a voice called from behind. "You really gonna wire that piece of hardware to your brain?"

  Van turned, grinning. "You know a better way to get a fast jackin'jolt, Chief?" Van replied, grinning. "Anyway, she would never do anything to hurt me."

  Julio Cordova was Van's crew chief, a short, stocky man with a heavy mustache and ebony skin who thought of the ugly little fighter as his personal property, something to be loaned out to Van with some concern about whether or not it would be returned in one piece.

  "Wasn't worried about you." He reached up and laid a proprietary hand on the vehicle's starboard weapons sponson. "I'm more concerned about what your impure thoughts'll do to her once you launch."

  "Ah, you never see the parties I take her to soon as we clear the chute." He shook his head in mock dismay. "Dancing naked on the bar . . . it's shocking, Chief. You wouldn't reco
gnize her. How was the diagnostic?"

  "Well, we had her guts out all day yesterday, Lieutenant, tryin' to find a short in her nav system interlock."

  "You find it?"

  "Nope, but the diagnostics stopped showing a downgrudge when we swapped out the EL-30 module. Could've been a programming glitch. Then again, maybe we bumped a loose wire back into place when we slammed the access shut."

  "Yeah, well, if I lose track of Tarazed while I'm out there, Chief," Van said slowly, "I'll be sure to let you know the thing's not fixed."

  "Just so you bring her back, Lieu. Otherwise, she comes out of your pay. And your bar tab."

  "Confederation credit?"

  "Gok, Lieu! That scuttin' kuso's not worth a nullhead's download. Make it Hegemony yen."

  "Christ, Chief, just whose side are you on, anyway?" Van continued his walk-around beneath the hanging bulk of the ship, scanning the cryo-H tanks carefully for any ice, for any telltale wisp of vapor that might indicate a containment breach. The craft's belly checked, he grabbed hold of a levitator strap, slipped his left boot into the stirrup, and rode up the support gantry. Careful where he placed hands and feet—a two-point-five-meter drop under two Gs killed you as dead as a five-meter fall under one—he stepped off onto the catwalk that gave access to the vehicle's dorsal side.

  At least it looked as though he wasn't going to have to put the chewing gum idea to the test. His warfiyer, an aging DR-80, was battered and chipped and scoured, with mismatched patches showing a long history of past field-expedient repairs, but its pressure hull was tight, its circuits checked out operational—with the possible exception of that glitchy nav interlock—and the RM tanks were holding pressure. Van'sGuard was ready for launch.

  Warflyers were themselves the product of field expediency. Though they'd been designed originally as tugs and high-mass manipulators for construction jobs in orbit, local planetary militias had found them useful as space-maneuverable weapons platforms . . . a fancy term for cheap space fighters. The young Rebellion, with access to few modern air/space fighter craft, had seized on warflyers as a means of addressing the Imperium's superiority in both technology and numbers. They were slow, they could neither operate within a planetary atmosphere nor achieve escape velocity, and many were so old that their pilots proudly claimed that stranger things than chewing gum maintained pressure and hull integrity.

  Van'sGuard was a prime example of the type. She was a Mitsubishi DR-80, originally an orbital constructor modified for a military role under the name Tenrai, the "Heavenly Thunder." With the new Emperor taking Tenrai as his Nengo era-name, however, Confederation pilots had taken to calling the DR-80 other things, few of them complimentary.

  "Warhawk" was perhaps the most consistent name out of many, though, one without obscene or scatological implications and bearing a long tradition in the history of military aviation. A propeller-driven fighter called the Warhawk had fought with distinction in the Second World War; a nuclear-powered transatmospheric craft had been dubbed Warhawk during the Third American Civil War.

  This Warhawk was an inelegant contraption, a squat cylinder three meters long stacked atop a pair of cryo-H storage tanks and a massive fusorpack and thruster. Bulky, round-ended sponsons mounted port and starboard housed weapons systems, maneuvering jets, and manipulators. The ungainly craft was, in fact, little more than a conventional warstrider with the leg assembly replaced by a thruster and six tons of reaction mass. Nose art graced the craft's stubby and debris-scarred prow, a naked woman flying above the script-written name Van'sGuard, her back arched and her head back, her arms outstretched like wings and her prominent breasts thrust forward in blatant mimicry of the Warhawk's paired weapons sponsons.

  The warflyer, massing eighteen tons fully fueled and loaded, was suspended from an overhead rack in Bay Seven of Hangar Deck One aboard the Confederation carrier Tarazed. The former hydrogen tanker had been converted years before into a carrier; her complement of eighty-two warflyers—six squadrons of twelve plus ten in reserve—was roughly equivalent to an Imperial air-space wing aboard one of the big dragon-carriers. Most were converted constructors like the DR-80. A few were genuine ascraft fighters, sleek darts that were all wing surface and streamlining, but even the best of those were obsolete compared to the Imperium's faster and more maneuverable Se-280s. Van had been flying the Warhawk exclusively now for over a year, and with good-natured scorn grudgingly preferred it to anything else in the rebels' flight-capable inventory.

  The hangar deck was a clashing, clattering, deafening place, a steel-walled cavern in which several hundred men were hard at work on dozens of warflyers of different types. Battle stations had sounded before Tarazed had come out of K-T space the first time, but the activity in the fighter bays, though chaotically loud, was smooth and purposeful. A tractor growled past below the catwalk, towing a DY-64 on a wheeled cart. Julio called something to him just then, but the words were lost in the shrilling of the tractor's horn.

  He leaned against the catwalk's railing, taking some of the weight off his aching feet. "What'd you say?" he shouted back.

  "I said, have you heard the who-was about Deadly Dev?"

  "I make it a point never to listen to gossip about my superior officers. What'd you hear?"

  "Word is he's already made contact with the Alyans through that mess of RD-40s." He pronounced the name "aliens," as did most of the Confederation's Inglic-speaking rank and file. "The whole gokin' Alyan fleet's comin' out to take the Impies in the rear."

  "I'll believe that one when I've got 'em pegged and IDed in my primary scan," Van called back. Who-was and rumor defined military shipboard life as much as overcrowded quarters and monotonous food. There were always a dozen prime bits of who-was floating around, and both the number and what Van liked to call the disbelief factor tended to shoot up astronomically just before an action.

  Julio rode a levitator strap up to the catwalk. "Maybe you're right, Lieu," he said cheerfully. "Just the same, be damned sure of what you're shootin' at out there. I'd hate you to take out one of our new allies by mistake!"

  A touch of his palm to an interface panel opened the Warhawk's command slot, a padded, coffin-shaped recess buried within the warflyer's main hull. With Julio's help, Van lowered himself in, careful not to let himself drop and injure a tailbone or an elbow. He was already wearing a shipsuit, a gray, skintight garment that covered everything but his hands and his head. Gloves and helmet were waiting for him inside the command slot. The gloves sealed over his cuffs, and the left one possessed circuitry that matched the cross hatching of gold and silver threads embedded at the base of his thumb, allowing him to touch an AI interface panel even with his shipsuit sealed.

  The helmet possessed three internal jacks on short leads. Again with Julio's help, he snicked the jacks into his cervical and temporal sockets, then carefully seated the helmet on his suit's self-sealing collar. Life-support feeds snapped home in connectors on his right chest and side. Data feedback from the suit's intelligent circuitry projected a status report against the upper left corner of his vision. Air . . . pressure . . . gas mix . . . physiology . . . all within normal parameters.

  Carefully, Van lay down in the slot, stretched out full length on the padding. He could hear Julio's harsh breathing as the crew chief leaned over him, jacking the data feed cables inside the slot home in the receptacles in Van's helmet.

  "Luck, sir!" Julio shouted, raising his voice unnecessarily. Despite the racket in the hangar bay, the pickups in Van's suit were working fine, but even people familiar with the technology tended to assume that someone swaddled head to toe in a sealed shipsuit was cut off from the rest of the world. "You bring my baby home, y'hear?"

  Van touched his right forefinger to his visor in ironic salute, as Julio gave him a cocky thumbs-up, then thumbed the control that closed the Warhawk's pilot slot. There was nothing so fancy—or as expensively complex—as a nanotechnic dissolving accessway. The hatch slid shut with a squeak and a bang, sealing Van in
a stifling, close-in darkness.

  He brought his left palm down against the interface panel positioned close by his hip. There was a flash of static . . .

  . . . and suddenly, again, Van remembered just how cut off from the rest of the world he had been. Walking around in your skin you tended to forget how sharp your senses could be, how clear your vision, how complete the array of data available through a full-socket feed in your cephlink. From his point of view, Van now was the DR-80, hanging from its cradle above Tarazed's hangar deck. He could see now in a three-sixty are all the way around and top and bottom as well, though he tended to focus in one direction at a time, just as if he were still seeing with human eyes. His view in one direction—directly aft—was blocked by the slush hydrogen tanks and fusion thruster, but he could see the other warflyers of his squadron—Third Squadron, the Gold Eagles—resting in their cradles around him, could see the vehicles and individual maintenance personnel and pilots by their ships, could see Julio riding a strap back down toward the deck.

  "Gold Eagle Lead, this is Three-five," he announced over the tactical circuit. "Logging on."

  "Copy, Three-five," a woman's voice replied. Lieutenant Commander Jena Cole was the Gold Eagle squadron CO. "Welcome aboard. Ready for tacfeed?"

  "Hit me."

  Data sluiced through the cephlinkage as a new window snapped open, covering half of Van's view of the hangar bay. Readouts showed the readiness of each of the ascraft and warflyers of the wing, four squadrons readying for launch, with the other two as backup on a five-minute hold. A 3-D, over all tactical view showed Tarazed and the transport Vindemiatrix running side by side, with Eagle and the smaller ships of the squadron spreading out in a broad, arrowhead shape ahead. The Imperial squadron, each ship neatly tagged with an identifying code and block of data, was coming to meet them, accelerating out from ShraRish at 3 Gs.