Warstrider: Symbionts (Warstrider Series, Book Four)

by Ian Douglas

  Katya learned later that teams of warstriders, too large and bulky and clumsy to move or stand upright within the thousands of kilometers of passageways filling that city-sized ship, had dragged themselves along with weapon-heavy arms gouging and clawing into centimeter-thick bulkheads, or propelled themselves with the magnetic push of their Nagas, burrowing headfirst like enormous, duralloy-sheathed moles, tearing up decks, smashing down partitions, plowing through every barrier in their path. Each time they burned or smashed their way through interior bulkheads into a new section, they were met by storms of escaping atmosphere that shrieked out through the opening in whirling snowstorms of freezing water vapor and air. As assault teams moved ahead, the ship's damage control systems sealed off breaches behind them and repressurized those areas of the ship that had been depressurized, but those systems could only take so much punishment before they started to fail. More and more Confederation strider teams blasted their way aboard, some through air locks, some through shattered gun turrets and external hardpoints, and most, like those with Katya, through the breaches blasted open by naval gunfire and warflyer assault and missiles, and soon whole sections of the ship were closing down as cold, hard vacuum claimed their passageways and compartments, and severed power feeds plunged them into darkness.

  In all, 265 Rangers made it aboard the Karyu and began fighting their way forward, one passageway at a time. Imperial Marines, many in heavy armor, fought back, but the only casualty was the pilot of a Scoutstrider that had already suffered heavy damage from laser fire during the approach. The hand laser fire from a team of Imperial Marines blew an already weakened access panel; when the circuit boards beyond vaporized, a bolt of high-amp current downloaded through the unfortunate pilot's brain, killing him instantly.

  Marines or crew personnel who tried to make stands at critical corridor junctions were fried by blasts from lasers or particle guns, or cut down by blasts from hivel cannons or machine guns. Few of the defenders cared to stand in place and fight back when the corridor-filling bulk of a Ghostrider or Swiftstrider dragged itself into view. As a result, many of the ship's larger compartments—recreation decks and barracks, supply vaults and hangar bays—grew more and more crowded with ship's personnel who'd given up the fight and were simply looking for a place, anyplace, to escape the crawling, armored behemoths. Those who could reach Karyu's escape pods and lifeboats abandoned ship, filling circumambient space with the drifting sparkle of strobing emergency beacons.

  Miyagi broadcast a general call to all personnel to fight to the death. Few in his crew had radios or compatches, however, and most intercom channels were off-line by that time, so the only ones to get the order were the marines. These retreated when they could and fought to the death when they had to. Soon it was clear that even the most valiant efforts—headlong, zero-G charges down fire-filled corridors dragging satchels of explosives—could avail nothing against warstriders, which could spot such teams as soon as they came into view and sweep them with laser or projectile fire.

  Twenty-eight minutes after the first warstriders smashed their way through blast-charred bulkheads and into the still-pressurized portion of the ship, the first warstriders reached the bridge, buried at the ship's core some two hundred meters from the first entry point. At that point, a pale and shaking Admiral Miyagi emerged from the link module from which he'd been directing the battle, then brought the muzzle of his own laser pistol to his head and pulled the trigger.

  His second-in-command broadcast the call for surrender.

  Katya saw little of this at the time. Dev was dead . . . dead. The agony of that realization filled her mind, blocking her thoughts, blinding her to the battle that was continuing to flash and stab across the heavens. She knew that she ought to join the fight. Damn it all . . . this amounted to dereliction of duty, hanging here in space watching men die.

  She opened her link to the Naga, urging it to move.

  She failed.

  Oh, kuso. She ran a diagnostic, found nothing wrong, and tried again. Still nothing. "Kurt? Ryan?"

  "We're here, Colonel."

  "I . . . I'm having some trouble."

  Kurt's voice sounded a bit distant. "I think there's a fault. Maybe in the interface with the Naga. I'm working on it."

  "We'll hold position here okay," Ryan told her. "Don't think they'll be needing us, though. Everything looks pretty much in hand."

  "I'm . . . I'm sorry about the commodore, Colonel," Kurt Allen said. "I know you two were pretty close."

  "Yeah. We were . . . close."

  "Can we do anything?"

  "Sign off. Let me . . . deal with it. Okay?"

  "Sure, Colonel," Ryan said. "We'll be on sentry, and jacked in if you need us."

  "And let me know as soon as you have the problem fixed. We should . . . should be moving."

  The rest of the battle was clearly almost over. Though the human ships had been badly handled, the surviving DalRiss vessels, most still fresh and relatively untouched by the storm thus far, were continuing to hurl their high-velocity projectiles, slamming them one after another into the Imperial ships. Even before Karyu gave up, several of the smaller Imperial ships were drawing off at high speed. When Karyu's XO broadcast his surrender, the rest of the Imperial battlefleet was already more than willing to break off the fight and begin accelerating for open space. One after another, they arrowed out into the night beyond Herakles's orbit, then vanished into K-T space.

  The Confederation ships, content to hold what they'd won in orbit, did not pursue.

  Against all odds, the Confederation—and their DalRiss allies—were victorious.

  But at what cost?

  Katya stared at the fuzzy, glowing cloud that was keeping pace with the Karyu on its outbound orbit—Daghar's funeral pyre, still radiating the fierce heat of its brief, furious ignition. The debris from that explosion continued to drift out from the center of the blast, retaining the velocity it had had before the explosion. Since they'd already achieved escape velocity from Herakles, it would no doubt fall into an extended and highly elliptical orbit around Mu Herculis.

  Katya had already probed that cloud with her Warlord's radar. The largest piece she'd been able to find measured perhaps a meter across . . . one meter, out of a structure that once had been two thousand meters across.

  "Oh, Dev!" She cried out, suddenly overcome by a devastating loneliness. "Dev!"

  "I'm . . . here, Katya."

  The jolt nearly knocked her off-line. She said nothing, but stared wildly into the glowing mist left from the explosion, here thoughts racing. Oh, God oh God I'm going mad he's dead I must've brain-burned oh dear God he's dead oh God—

  "Please, Katya. You're not crazy. And . . . I don't think I am, either."

  "Dev . . . Dev . . ." She stopped, groping for feelings that were whipcracking through her brain. Dev you goker don't do this to me you can't possibly be alive!

  But she ran a quick systems check, looking for the source of the feed that was carrying that voice, so eerily like Dev's on-line speech.

  It was coming through the Naga.

  "You know how we've speculated about the Naga?" Dev's voice asked her. "About how their subcellular makeup is an awful lot like networks of human neurons . . . but it's also like a computer network, in a way, with lots and lots of separate processors. That's how they can encode memories that, that go back billions of years, in matrices of nanotechnic subcells."

  You're dead I saw you die oh Dev, Dev, Dev I miss you so much!

  "I miss you too, love. And I guess I am dead, in a way. My body certainly died in that explosion."

  That jolted her too, but the shock smashed the chain of uncontrollable thoughts racing through her brain, made her stop and pull her thinking back into some semblance of rational cause and effect, stimulus and response.

  "Dev?"

  "Yes, Katya."

  "Where are you?"

  "I . . . I think I'm in the network of Naga fragments in the DalRiss fleet. I find .
. . yes. I find I can shift from ship to ship. I'm in your warstrider now. With you. At least a part of me is."

  The thought was at once bizarre, almost horrible . . . and reassuring.

  "We've known for a long time that Nagas are very good at patterning things. And they can think . . . very quickly. Faster than the DalRiss. Somehow, I'm still not sure how, they, they patterned my thoughts. Made a replica of me, I guess, but as an electronic pattern, stored within the matrix of their organic computers."

  "Are you . . . are you real? Or a copy?" The questions hurt, brutally direct.

  "Kat, that question is meaningless. I remember myself as Dev Cameron. I remember my whole life . . . better, I think, than I ever could with a brain of flesh and blood. I remember . . . oh, God. Things from when I was little. My mother. My father . . ."

  "Dev . . ."

  "I remember making love with you in that ascraft." She felt him smile. "Twice."

  "I saw Daghar explode."

  "Yes."

  "Your body was destroyed."

  "Yes. But, well . . . where is your mind, Katya?"

  "Mind is the interaction of all of the patterns of neural stimuli in the active brain, Dev. There's no such thing as a mind apart from body. There's no such thing as a soul."

  "I used to believe that. I'm not so sure now. The DalRiss know a hell of a lot more about how brain and body work than we do, and I think, I think that they believe in souls. Spirits, if you like.

  "Maybe all we need to know at this point, though, is that mind, whatever it is, must work over teleoperational distances, somehow. Look, it doesn't matter whether you see over optic nerves a few centimeters long, or by way of optic sensors and a lasercom link a few million kilometers long, right?"

  "Of course. That's the whole point behind teleoperation. Or warstriders, for that matter."

  "Okay. While I was linked through the Nagas in the DalRiss fleet, I was . . . I was touching the other ships. At one point, I looked for you. I could feel you over the link. Was that, that sensation traveling to my mind aboard Daghar? Or was my mind traveling to you, here aboard your warstrider?"

  "I think the question is meaningless."

  "Don't be so sure, Kat. When someone says his mind is elsewhere . . ." He stopped, and she heard his chuckle. She shivered. It was as though he really was right there beside her. "Anyway, the Naga on one of the other ships must have picked up the pattern of my mind when the Daghar exploded."

  "Dev, you're not a pattern. People aren't patterns!"

  "Maybe not. But if you can call mind a set of programs run in parallel . . ." The voice stopped, pausing for a moment. "Here's one way to think of it, Kat. We've talked before about the Nagas being like an enormous computer network. Each fragment is a node, itself a collection of some trillions or quadrillions of molecule-sized computers. Organic nanotechnics."

  "Yes. . . ."

  "The whole could be considered to be a massively parallel networked system, a widely distributed processing network with one hell of a lot of redundancy. I, the important part of 'I,' anyway, was distributed throughout a large part of the whole system when Daghar blew. It patterned my mental software, copied everything that I was . . . or saved it, or whatever term you want to use. Think of it . . ." and she'd felt him grin. "Think of it as having me permanently jacked in. The important thing is, I'm alive . . . sort of, anyway. And that's enough for me right now."

  "Are you, Dev?" Dev I want to see you want to hold you be held oh Dev I want you inside me again oh please—

  "I'm afraid I can't, my love. Not anymore. But I'm here. With you. For as long as you want me."

  Her thoughts were crumbling again, veering into chaotic nonsense. She battled for control. She felt as though she was going to cry . . . she wanted to cry, and yet, linked into the Warlord's AI, she couldn't.

  Warstriders, she found, couldn't cry.

  Epilogue

  Many wonders there be, but none more wondrous than man.

  —Antigone

  Sophocles

  Fifth century B.C.E.

  Travis Sinclair, it turned out, had made it safely to Liberty. It wasn't necessary, though, for the Confederation fleet to track him from system to system, as planned. Ten hours after the battle, a Confederation frigate, the Freedom, jumped back into the outskirts of the Heraklean system in order to check on what the Imperial fleet was doing. When Darlene Vonnegut, Freedom's, skipper, found Miyagi's battlefleet scattered and fled, his flagship still broadcasting its surrender call, she jumped back to Liberty to summon a task force, scraped together from those ships that had managed to flee the debacle at Herakles.

  And a good thing, too, Katya thought, for the only ships able to enter K-T space in the entire Confederation fleet were Tarazed, Mirach, and Vindemiatrix, and sending those lightly armed starships hopping from system to system in search of the missing Confederation fleet would have verged on foolhardiness. Eagle and the other Confederation survivors of Second Herakles might be jump-capable again someday, depending on how the repairs went . . . but it wouldn't be soon.

  "I was damned sorry to hear about Dev," Sinclair told her. It was nearly three months after the battle. They were on Liberty, in the new Confederation headquarters in the capital city of Lincoln. They sat alone together, in Sinclair's office. A viewall looked out over the city, and the sullen, ember-bright glow of Liberty's sun, 70 Ophiuchi A.

  She nodded and managed a smile. "Thanks, General."

  "Are you all right?"

  Again, she nodded.

  "That's the Katya I know. There's a hell of a lot to do yet, even now. I'm going to miss Dev. I would miss you, if we lost you as well."

  "I'm not sure what you need me for now. The war, well, the war's over, isn't it?"

  "If the truce holds. If the Emperor ratifies the new agreement. If hotheads on one of the occupied Confederation worlds don't launch an attack on the Imperials during the next few weeks. A lot of ifs . . . but yes, I think the war is over."

  "Thank God."

  "Yes. And thank the people who bought that victory for us. People like Dev."

  Clearly, the Empire, the entire Hegemony, had been shaken from Frontier to Core Worlds to Earth herself by the Battle of Second Herakles. The knowledge that the Confederation had allied with the DalRiss had proven to be at least as critical for this revolution as an alliance with the nation of France had been in another revolution, over 760 years before. A cease-fire had gone into effect almost at once, and so far it had lasted, even on New America, where armed guerrillas continued to share the world with Imperial occupation forces. Negotiations were under way, both on Earth and on Liberty. Imperial recognition of the Confederation was widely accepted as fact; all that remained was to map out the actual extent of their victory. Rebel worlds currently unoccupied by Imperials, like Liberty and Rainbow, would certainly receive full independence. Occupied planets, those like New America and Eridu, would probably be allowed to go, or the question might be put to a vote ratifying the decision on each world. Other worlds that had indicated their desire to be free by signing the Declaration of Reason, but which had not joined in the fighting, planets like Loki and Juanyekundu and Deseret . . . well, their fates still had to be worked out.

  But peacefully.

  Both sides were sick of war.

  As for the DalRiss, they would be all right as well. She'd heard later that the long-expected Imperial fleet had, indeed, arrived at ShraRish some weeks after the fight at Herakles. They'd dropped out of K-T space, taken up orbit . . . and vanished.

  Could Achievers make other things go away? Or bend space in unexpected ways? Gods, so little was known yet about these beings, able to bend reality with a thought. It was a dreadful mistake to underestimate them.

  "Actually, General, I think what I need most right now is work."

  "That's the spirit. I'm sure Dev would approve."

  She almost laughed out loud. No one but her knew of Dev's curious survival.

  They'd talked about it a lo
ng time, after she'd been picked up and returned to the Eagle. When she'd jacked in to ViRcom a message to Freedom and the other Confederation reinforcements, he'd been there.

  She'd seen him . . . touched him. And they'd made love together on a nameless, deserted beach with the ocean surf crashing nearby. All of the myriad and intricate programming that had been Dev, it seemed, had been saved, and that included the far cruder programs that had once been resident in his now vaporized RAM. What was a program but saved information? The information was still there, distributed through the DalRiss fleet.

  They made love, and she tried not to think about the fact that his touch, the feel of him on her and around her and inside of her, was not real.

  What was "real," anyway? She closed her eyes and downloaded the scene to her biological memory once again.

  "They want me to go with them," Dev told her afterward, as they lay together on the wet sand. "I'll be gone a long time."

  "What? Who?" She'd been wondering about Dev's body. It was just information, after all, and the Naga might have preserved a pattern of that as well. . . .

  "The DalRiss, of course."

  "Can't you . . . stay? We could talk with Sinclair, maybe see about having the DalRiss migrate to human space. . . ."

  "Uh-uh, Kat. They sacrificed a lot to help us here. And I sure as hell don't want anyone trying to lay claim to their fleet just because the . . . call it the soul of one human striderjack is somehow trapped inside their communications network."

  "What . . . so you're going with the DalRiss exodus? Where are they going?"

  Again, she felt the warmth of his infectious smile. He couldn't be dead, he couldn't. She couldn't be imagining his warmth, his humor, his smell, his presence in this much detail, and it had none of the hollow emptiness of a recorded encounter. He, everything about him, was too real. Somehow, the Naga link had preserved so very much more of his personality than words and thoughts alone.