Netlink (32 page)

The snow cleared on the disappointingly flat, two-D screen, and Japanese kanji characters printed themselves across the display.

ACCESS GRANTED:

IMPERIAL EMBASSY, JEFFERSON CITY,

NEW AMERICA, 26 DRACONIS

TO

PALACE OF HEAVEN, SINGAPORE ORBITAL,

EARTH, SOL

He uploaded a department name and the name of the man he wished to speak to. Seconds later, a fleshy, overweight face looked out of the screen at him.
“Moshi-moshi.”

“Hai, Munimorisama,”
the ambassador said. “Please forgive the intrusion. This is Mishima.”

Admiral Munimori, arguably the most powerful man in the Empire, more powerful even than the figurehead emperor, nodded. “It must be urgent indeed to use
o-denwa.”

“It is about the ryu fleet on its way to New America,” Mishima said. “I believe you may wish to relay new orders to its commander.”

He began describing his talk with Senator Alessandro.

Chapter 20

Death stands at attention, obedient, expectant, ready to serve, ready to shear away the peoples en masse; ready, if called on, to pulverize, without hope of repair, what is left of civilization. He awaits only the word of command.

—
The Gathering Storm

S
IR
W
INSTON
C
HURCHILL

C
.
E
. 1948

Kara had received permission from the
Chidori Maru’s
skipper to link in during the approach to Highport. She’d heard that something strange was happening in orbit around New America, but what she’d heard simply didn’t sound credible.

She’d had to see for herself, and she was wondering if she even believed it now.

It was sixty-two days since the battle at Kasei. Kara, Sergeant Daniels, and the other two men who’d escaped from the Martian sky-el with her had made it safely first to Xi Bootis, where they’d transferred to the
Chidori Maru
without incident, then flown straight back to 26 Draconis for the final part of their long dogleg home.

But what was it they’d returned home to?

Ships were gathered in orbit, clustered closely about the Highport orbital station and drifting in a loose cloud that strung out across over a thousand kilometers of space. Most distinctive, perhaps, were the enormous DalRiss cityships, dozens of black, organic, multiarmed shapes in silent orbit amid clouds of smaller vessels, some of human design, many clearly products of Naga programming, jet-black, sharp pointed, and alien.

More ominous by far, however, were the kilometer-long dragonships, no fewer than five of the great ryu carriers, together with a literal host of lesser Imperial warships.

“My God,” Kara said, staring in mingled horror and awe. “My God, where did
they
come from?”

Chidori Maru’s
warbook was already downloading data across her visual field, matching, naming, and describing the larger vessels. The list was impressive, reading like a digest of all of the Imperium’s largest and most powerful warships.

There was
Shinryu,
the Divine Dragon, marginally the largest ryu carrier in the Imperial fleet. Back in 2540, she’d been flagship of the First Alyan Expedition, the mission that had made contact with the DalRiss homeworld. Hanging in
Shinryu’
s shadow was
Hiryu,
the Flying Dragon, smaller but sleeker and more maneuverable. Nearby was
Donryu,
the Storm Dragon, and the second ryu in recent history to bear that name. The earlier
Donryu
had been destroyed by Dev Cameron and the Heraklean Naga at the First Battle of Herakles.
Gingaryu,
the Dragon of the Milky Way, was a close twin to
Shinryu,
slightly smaller but with a more complex tangle of weapons, turrets, nacelles, and parapets clustered over her entire, spear-headshaped length.

Almost as an afterthought, Kara recognized the distinctive silhouette of one more dragonship—
Karyu,
the Fire Dragon… now the flagship of the Confederation Navy.

The host of smaller ships included dozens of cruisers, hundreds of destroyers, an uncounted multitude of corvettes and frigates, patrol boats, and even free-orbiting warflyers.

“Looks like a convention for the whole goking Imperial Navy,” Sergeant Daniels said, observing the gathering through Kara’s bridge link. “Kuso, Lieutenant! What are we gonna do?”

Kara didn’t answer at once. She’d been on the point of asking him… but he’d reminded her of her responsibility, her
duty
as a Confederation officer. She could, she should accept advice from her NCOs, but the decision was up to her.

“I really don’t know, Sergeant,” she said. “Any suggestions?”

“Well, they don’t seem to be taking much notice of us. Maybe we could kind of slip past and head back into K-T space.”

“Yes,” the freighter’s skipper said, joining the discussion. “But where?”

“Anywhere,” Kara said. “Hell, I think we’d be safer in Earth orbit. The whole damned Imperial Navy is
here?”

“Doesn’t look like much of a battle was fought,” Daniels said. “Look. Look at the old
Karyu.
She would have been in the thick of it when the Impies jumped in, and she doesn’t even look scratched.”

“Did we just surrender then?” Kara wondered.

“Lieutenant?” the freighter’s skipper called. “I have a call for you. Comm mod linkage, private.”

“What?” Kara was taken aback. “From who?”

“Senator Alessandro, of the Confederation Free Senate.”

The captain stressed the phrase as though carefully repeating what he’d just heard word for word. Kara heard the emphasis and recognized that that wording held a message for her, an assurance that despite what it looked like, the Confederation, and its government, continued to exist.

But what were Imperial ryu carriers doing in orbit over New America? Damn… you take the long way home, with two months of being out of touch, and everything changes on you.…

She opened a communications room for the meeting, a virtual reality modeled after the gathering room in the house at Cascadia. She stood there, in the same room where she’d talked with her mother during the party… how many months ago now?

That Japanese woman walked in with Daren right over
there.

She shook herself, trying to order her thoughts. She would be dignified and reserved. She would not let her upset show. She was trembling with excitement, with worry, with a burning and barely suppressed curiosity, and more than anything else with a dawning horror that everything had been for nothing,
nothing.…

Her mother entered the room.

“Mums!” Kara cried. “What the gok is going on?”

So much, she thought with an embarrassed, wry stab of self-criticism, for dignified…

“Hello, Kara. I know this all must be quite a surprise—”

“That doesn’t describe it by one percent! My God, the Imperial Navy is in orbit. What happened? Is the war over already?”

Katya looked uncomfortable. “Kara, there was no war.”

“No… war…” Kara didn’t understand. “Excuse me, but I thought I just went and
started
one!”

“A lot has happened since you left—”

“I should goking well think so!”

“First of all, Dev Cameron has returned.”

Kara’s jaw dropped. “Dev… Cameron.” The universe seemed to tilt and whirl around her head. “Daren’s biofather…”

Her mother closed her eyes, took a breath, then opened them again. “Yes. He came back a few weeks ago.”

Kara shook her head, running a hand through her short hair. “Wait a minute. Wait a minute. I thought he was
dead.…
”

Katya sighed. “Come and sit with me. This is going to be difficult.…”

Half an hour later, Kara had heard the whole story. It would take a while to get all of the pieces settled in and properly cataloged, but she knew now about the threat posed by the Web.

And, if half of what her mother had told her about that alien intelligence were true, she could understand the need to patch things up with the Impies.

But
kuso…
!

“What’s the matter?” her mother asked, watching her expression as she balled her hand into a fist and brought it down on the sofa. “Did you want a war so much?”

“Want
—” Kara stopped, forced herself to cool. “No one, especially a soldier, ever wants a war,” she said quietly, with deadly intensity.

“You wouldn’t know it from the way you’re acting.”

“Mother… someone I cared about, a comrade, died at Aresynch. He died right there in front of me, in a firefight. He may have saved my life, for all I know. Other good men and women died at Noctis Labyrinthus. Why?”

“Kara, if you would let me finish—”

“Why the hell did they have to die, if you politos were going to turn around and make peace with the goking Impies while we were still out there…
?”

“They died because we made the best decisions we could, with the survival of our people and our government and our way of life at stake. They died doing their duty, which was to follow the orders the government and ConMilCom HQ gave them. They died buying us a
chance
at survival. Isn’t that enough?”

Kara still felt weak and… betrayed, somehow.

There were precedents in history. She remembered downloading an account of the Battle of New Orleans during her training at the Academy. The battle, on January 8th of 1815, had been fought between the British under General Sir Edward Packenham and troops of the then brand-new American Republic, under the command of General Andrew Jackson. The threat to the city of New Orleans had been very real; the victory of the American forces had been real as well. Packenham’s veterans had aligned their scarlet ranks and walked steadfastly into a hail of American fire, falling in droves. By battle’s end, the casualty figures showed an astonishingly unbalanced flavor: eight Americans killed and fourteen wounded behind their cotton bale ramparts, against something like two thousand casualties all together for the British.

None of the men fighting before the city of New Orleans that foggy January morning had any idea that the Treaty of Ghent, ending hostilities between the United States of America and the British Empire, had been signed two weeks before, on Christmas Eve of 1814. In those days, before radio or telegraph, before ViRnews medes and comm modules, the fastest means of communication across the sea was—as with the twenty-sixth-century sea of space—by ship. News of the treaty didn’t reach the Americas until mid-February. The most splendid American victory of the war—what some historians marked as one of the more important battles of the war—had been fought after the war itself was already over.

This wasn’t quite that bad, Kara told herself. But it was disconcerting, nonetheless.

“Your raid was not a wasted effort,” Katya said, continuing. “Far from it. You captured the I2C prototype, and the data on how to build it. Our techs already have Naga replicators going, turning out new ones.”

“You have a communications network already up and running?”

“Actually, it turns out that the Imperials had a working net pretty much in place already. As we suspected, they have the units—they call them
denwa,
by the way. ‘Telephones.’ ”

“I assume they’ve tied at least some of their major warships into the net as well.”

It was a logical guess. There’d not been time for the back-and-forth of negotiations between Earth and New America, the working out of details, the assembly of such a fleet as the one now in orbit if the maximum speed of communications between star systems was still limited to one or two light years per day. Those ryus must have already been on the way to New America.…

Kara felt a cold chill at that. The Imperials had been
that
close to crushing New America with almost their full might.

“That’s right. They also have them connecting their principal embassies on various worlds, both in the Shichiju and in the Confederation. That was a good thing, actually, a real lucky break. With the comm network already in place, it’s turning out to be easier than expected to wire in more units and extend the overall system. Pretty soon, we’ll be able to use a comm module to have a face-to-face ViRconference with someone on the other side of the Shichiju.”

“Then how did Operation Sandstorm help a damned thing?”

“Perhaps it gave us more credibility in the eyes of the Empire. Or maybe it just gave us more credibility in our own eyes. In any case, the Imperials are taking us on as full partners here. The Aquilan Expeditionary Force will be a joint Confederation-Hegemony mission. Imperial warships. Hegemony science vessels. Much of the Confederation fleet, of course. The DalRiss have been gathering, coming through from Alya as the survivors of the fight at Nova Aquila make it back. We have about fifty cityships so far. They’ll be carrying the human fleet piggyback, with their Achievers. That will let us cover the distance between here and Nova Aquila in a few quick jumps instead of something like three years.”

“Where does this leave us? The Black Phantoms, I mean?”

“Oh, you’ll be in the thick of it, I imagine,” Katya said. She looked away, as if wanting to say more… and suppressing the urge.

“Come on! Tell me!”

“We don’t have all of the details settled yet,” Katya said. “But as things are going now, the Black Phantoms who volunteer for this will be assigned to the
Carl Friedrich Gauss.
I can’t tell you more than that.”

“The
Carl
—” Kara’s eyes narrowed. “That’s a research ship!”

“That’s right.”

“What is a warstrider unit supposed to do aboard a research ship?”

“We don’t really know yet what to expect of Operation Nova,” Katya said. “It could become a military op.”