by Ian Douglas
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 Alyan 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.
Frequently, though, human warriors would encounter human-built warstriders that had been only partly absorbed . . . and changed, somehow, by the Xenophobes, their pilots dead, their weapons and armor turned against their former owners. Frequently, the legs would be gone, while the torsos and heads drifted eerily across the battlefield on the blue-glowing halos of the Xeno's magnetic field, hideous parodies of their original forms. It was as though the Xenos were battlefield scavengers, picking up anything that might be useful and incorporating it into their nightmarish arsenal.
Xenozombies was the name given to these hybrids.
"Okay," Dev said. "Hear me out on this one.
"First, our primary target. If we're going to carry this one off, it's going to have to be the Ryu. We could annihilate every other ship in the Imperial battlefleet and still lose if the Karyu was still able to fight. We could land Katya and her whole regiment of Rangers on the ground, and Karyu could wipe them out from orbit. On the other hand, if we can kill or cripple the Karyu, the other ships migh
t break and run, and the Imperial ground troops will be ours for the asking."
"That's a big 'might,' Commodore," Captain Curtis said.
"Not so big, Jase," Katya told him. "The Karyu will be the flagship for the whole squadron. With their senior officers and battle staff out of the fight, the rest will be uncoordinated."
"Kuso," Ann Petruccio said. "Uncoordinated? They'll be blundering around in the goking dark!"
Dev could sense the doubt in the minds of some of the people at the table, the excitement in others. He grabbed at the excitement, shaped it with his words, rode it.
"That will be our strategy, people. Cut off their head, and the rest of their deployment is going to die. At the same time, we will employ a new measure of coordination and control within our own force, one that should give us an edge even against a Ryu-carrier."
"What new coordination?" Hagan asked. "What are you talking about?"
"I'll be directing the fleet," Dev said. "But not from the Eagle. Instead, I'll be in Daghar."
"Daghar?" Hagan asked. "What the hell's that?"
"It's one of the DalRiss ships. Their newest one, actually, just about full-grown and ready to go." He looked at their faces, gauging the feelings behind expressions that ran from interest to bemusement to shock. He smiled. "It's also the place we call 'Migrant Camp.' I'm told the name means 'Joining.' Actually, 'Moving toward a joining' might be a better translation. I was told that that ship, people, is going to be the flagship of the entire DalRiss exodus fleet.
"But first, the DalRiss are going to use her to help us."
"You, you'll be coordinating the Confederation fleet from there?" Katya asked.
"That's the idea. It'll be like the Xenolink on Herakles again, only this time, I'll be directing a warfleet."
"But how does that help us with the coordination?" Curtis asked. "Okay, you're in a DalRiss ship. Fine. How do you talk to the rest of us? I thought you said the DalRiss couldn't even handle lasercom transmissions."
"I'm coming to that," Dev said. "Now, warstriders are self-contained combat machines, capable of fighting in any environment, right? Miniature space ships, warflyers, if you like, but with legs instead of propulsion units and reaction mass."
Bailey grinned. "Hell, Commodore. I always thought of warflyers as warstriders with plasma jets instead of legs." Several at the table laughed nervously.
"Either way," Dev said. "The point is, we have one wing of warflyers, eighty-odd ships. Captain Bailey? What're our chances of taking out the Karyu with eighty flyers?"
Bailey shook his head, frowning. "Not good, sir. Not good at goking all. If you could work the big ships in close enough to take out most of their PDLs first, well, maybe. But we'd lose a lot of good boys and girls in the process. And you'd probably lose Eagle and Constellation and the rest."
"That was my feeling, too. Now, what if we take, say, two battalions of Katya's warstriders. Two, maybe three hundred machines. We bring them aboard a DalRiss ship, one of the big ones, like Daghar, where a fragment of the GhegnuRish Naga is waiting for them. Each warstrider accepts a fragment of that Naga, after we tell it what we want, of course. We then use the DalRiss ship to deposit those warstriders where we want them in space, as close to the Karyu as we can get them."
There was a sudden rush of noise around the table, sharp intakes of breath, the bump of chairs against floor or table, several shouts.
"Christ, Commodore!"
"That's nuts!"
"Is he crazy?"
Katya's eyes met Dev's and held them, burning. "Dev, you want my people to link with Xenos?"
"Symbionts," Dev told them. He grinned. "A three-way combination of Naga fragments, DalRiss comels, and humans. And here's the way it's going to work. . . ."
Chapter 30
" . . . so there I was, comin' in like this, see, and he pulls a wing-over hard to the left but I seen it comin' and I just slide in on his six, sweet and slick as your lover's ass. He started jinkin' of course, but I locked on, got tone, and cut loose. Sweet Jesus, you shoulda' seen the goker burn!"
—Lieutenant Harriman Douglass
In the ViRdocumentary Spacefighter
C.E. 2375
Nearly thirty hours later, Katya met Dev in the cargo hold of an ascraft slung from Eagle's belly, the same ascraft, in fact, that they'd made love in once before, just before the expeditionary fleet had departed Mu Herculis. The canisters of organic precursors were gone, now, used up during the passage to Alya or transferred to other storage compartments aboard the Eagle as space had become available. The nightmare that had ended that last rendezvous was forgotten now, replaced by the excitement of discovery, and by an urgent, almost frantic passion that acknowledged, tacitly, that this could be the last time.
Certainly, it would be the last opportunity they had to be alone together for some time to come. Ever since Dev had given the final set of orders, both of them had been working furiously to prepare for the return to Herakles, an operation that Jothan Bailey had dubbed "Changeling." Katya's troops and Bailey's flyers all had been briefed, their plans drawn up, communications protocols worked out with the DalRiss.
Next, the First and Second Battalions of the 1st Rangers had been flown to the Daghar, where, one by one, they'd met smaller pieces of the huge ship's controlling Naga fragment. Each small fragment, measuring two or three meters across and massing a couple of tons, had flowed out from the ten-thousand-ton mass of the big fragment at the heart of the grounded DalRiss ship-city and encased a warstrider's legs and lower torso. Slender extrusions had grown their way along sensor and power conduits and infiltrated the entire internal system of each warstrider; a physical link with the pilot provided communications—and the new means of coordination Dev had been looking for.
At the same time, the DalRiss city that the humans had known as Migrant Camp was breaking up, the thousands of mobile buildings and their DalRiss parasite-occupants moving well back from the starfish-shaped mountain of the city-ship. When the last warstrider was finally aboard and the city completely evacuated, the DalRiss had expended a single Achiever. There was a thunderclap, an explosion of sky-rending noise as the vacuum remaining when the huge ship vanished was suddenly and catastrophically filled. Daghar had reappeared in orbit over ShraRish, in company with the human squadron and the growing fleet of smaller DalRiss ships. On the ground, the Migrant Camp DalRiss had begun moving once more, crawling toward a new site, where they would begin growing a new city-ship for their eventual exodus from their world.
Katya, after seeing to her troops aboard the Daghar, had crawled through one of the winding tunnels of the DalRiss ship and into Eagle, which was being held to Daghar's flank by an extrusion of the Naga. Soon, after completing some necessary planning with the human squadron's senior officers, both she and Dev would return to the DalRiss ship.
First, though, they found these minutes for each other. As before, the two of them clung to one another in free fall, linked at the waist by the slender tether of the tsunagi nawa. Katya had needed this time. Even more, she'd needed to talk to Dev in privacy.
"Something's changed in you," she told him, holding him close. "Again."
"Oh? How have I changed?"
"I'm not sure. You're more certain of yourself. And more committed to, to the cause, I think. More than you've ever been before. But I'm scared."
"What about?"
"You're going to be Xenolinking again."
"A lot of us are going to be Xenolinking, you included."
She shook her head. "That's not the same thing, and you know it. The rest of us, we'll just be touching a small Naga fragment, the one we have on our striders. You'll be tied in with a big fragment, bigger than the one that took you to Herakles and back. It's the difference between having a compatch jacked into your socket, and being in full linkage."
She'd tried to tell herself that this wouldn't be the same as when Dev linked with the planetary Naga on Herakles. These two-ton fragments she and the rest of her people wou
ld be linking with would be nothing like the incredible repository of knowledge and power and memory of a full planetary Naga.
She also knew, deep down, that mass wasn't the issue. Dev was being transformed by this damned physical and mental communion with the Xenophobes, and each experience seemed to take him farther from her.
He smiled at her, but his eyes were cold and a little distant. "That's no reason for you to be scared, Kat."
"I think it is. Not my Xenolink, that I can handle. Maybe not even yours, though I feel like you've . . . surrendered to that addiction you told me about once. No, Dev, I'm afraid I'm losing you. These past few days you've been, well, growing. In ways I don't understand. Once you were afraid you weren't human anymore. Now I'm beginning to wonder if you're not more than human, somehow. The way you know things without being told . . ."
" . . . is fundamentally no different from the artificial enhancements provided by our cephlinks," he finished for her. "Through our links, we have direct access to AI-controlled hardware, to information, to instant communications that we take for granted, but that our ancestors would think was pure magic."
"You didn't want to Xenolink again."
"Hmm. Yeah, I was scared of linking again. But I feel differently about that now. When I linked with the DalRiss ship, with the Naga fragment in that ship, I mean, I was in control. I was me. If anything, the larger fragment in Daghar ought to give me even more control. Over my surroundings, and over me. And I'll need it, too, if we're going to pull this off."
Daghar's Naga fragment was still only a tiny, tiny fraction of the mass of the Heraklean Naga. Still . . . would linking with it sweep Dev up in the madness that had embraced him on Herakles, that storm-and lightning-torn day when the sky had gone black and a man-become-god had hurled rocks into the heavens, challenging an Imperial battle group to single combat?
