Symbionts (24 page)

And they
would
break through. The key to this type of space naval battle, with the opposing forces on opposing courses and closing head-on was to do as much damage when the two forces interpenetrated as possible.

With six ships in his command, the Imperial CO had chosen an octahedral formation, placing his two destroyers in line ahead, positioning the four smaller ships at the remaining four corners halfway between them. It was, Dev had to admit as he studied the approaching formation through the tactical sim, a good choice, probably the best possible given the Imperials’ disadvantage in numbers. It concentrated his strongest units along the axis of the Confederation squadron and ensured that the smaller ships were well placed for maximum mutual support.

And after that there was nothing to do but wait.

It was a fact of modern combat that the troops—whether fighter pilots like Vandis, or striderjacks, or even legger infantry in combat armor—had at their command far more information about what was actually going on around them than had their predecessors throughout history. Direct data feeds and downloads gave them up-to-the-second information on the positions of friendly and hostile forces, gave them superbly detailed views of the fighting, allowed officers to see what their troops were seeing, permitted frontline troops to request artillery or air support and have it delivered with an accuracy that would have seemed magical to soldiers of even just a few centuries before.

The problem—one that had plagued all of humankind since the beginnings of the Information Age five centuries before—was that often there was simply too much available information. A general in command of an army, or an admiral commanding a fleet, was expected to see the big picture without becoming entangled in the fussy detail of managing the battle at the level of individual squads, platoons, or ships. A single striderjack, on the other hand, or the pilot jacked into a warflyer or the legger crouched in a trench, didn’t need to know how his decisions and actions fit into an entire, sprawling battle involving tens or hundreds of thousands of other people; indeed, it was usually desirable that he not be aware of more than his immediate responsibilities. More than once in the past, democratically run armies had faced disaster when the soldiers decided to vote on whether or not a suicide attack or a last-ditch defense or even participation in a war was really necessary.

How much to tell the troops about a given tactical or strategic situation was one of the great ethical dilemmas of modem warfare. The technology was such that individuals like Sublieutenant Vandis could watch the entire battle unfold within their cephlinked reality. In general, and within the limits imposed by the need for security, the Confederation military was more liberal with the information it allowed its troops to have than was the Imperium, which preferred to ration battle management information to its troops with rigid and miserly precision. Often, this had worked to the Confederation’s advantage—as when Dev Cameron had for purposes of propaganda and disinformation bluffed a Japanese escort captain into believing that he was a UV Cetan.

For the moment, at least, Sublieutenant Vandis had access to very nearly as much information as had Commodore Cameron. He lay within the padded coffin of his Warhawk’s slot, watching the battle unfold with the superbly sharp and crisp detail of a full cephlinked download in his mind. Acceleration had ceased some time ago and
Tarazed
was in free-fall, but Van felt the weightlessness no more than he’d noticed the 2 Gs after jacking in.

Van’sGuard
had been lowered into a launch tube and locked in, chambered like an eighteen-ton shell in the breech of some gigantic cannon. Though he could have maintained the feed from the probe data simulation, he’d chosen to switch that channel off in order to concentrate on more immediate problems. He was surrounded by pitch-blackness now, but he wasn’t aware of the monotony of the view. He concentrated instead on the squadron’s prelaunch checklist, which flickered through his mind as Commander Cole ran through the entries, a litany of ship systems answered by “go” or “no go.”

“Power systems,” Commander Cole’s voice announced.

“Go,” Van replied, his attention focused on the constellation of tiny green lights aglow in his mind next to scrolling blocks of data.

“Port attitude thrusters.”

“Go.”

“Starboard thrusters.”

“Go.”

“Dorsal thrusters.”

“Go.”

“Ventral thrusters.”

“Go.”

“Thruster interlock and system program.”

“Go. And go.”

“Navigational systems.”

He checked that readout with particular care, searching for signs of the short that had been plaguing the maintenance crew, switching it on and off several times through his link. “Zeroed,” he said at last. “Set and go.”

“Weapons.”

“Lasers charged to one hundred percent. Missiles loaded and safed.”

Some part of his awareness, though, was still focused on the unfolding battle ahead. Both fleets had ceased acceleration; if no further burns were made by either side, their respective lead elements would pass through one another in thirty-five minutes. The waiting, Van decided, was going to kill him long before any Imperial missile even had the chance.

It was always this way before a launch, whether he was doing it in sim or for real. The pressure built, he felt impatient, even angry, willing the time to pass and the action to start. Later, he knew from experience, he would go iceworld, cold and hard as water ice on an outer system world at fifty Kelvin. For now, it was all he could do to focus on the simple checklist.

“Targeting systems.”

“Checking… go.”

“Life support.”

“Go.”

“Communications. Switch off ship internal circuits. Go to squadron tactical.”

“Switching to squadron taccom, and testing: alfa, bravo, Charlie, delta…”

“Read you on taccom, Three-five. Comtest go.” There was a pause as Commander Cole checked the communications frequencies of each of the other warflyers in the squadron one by one.

“Okay, children,” Cole finally announced. “That’s twelve for twelve, checked and go. The Gold Eagles are ready to fly.”

Chatter from the various members of the squadron cut across Van’s comm channel. “So what the hell is an eagle, anyway?”

“A mean-ass aviform, Carey.Like a grimmoth, but bigger.

“And extinct.”

“If they were so mean, why are they extinct?” Van wanted to know.

“Hey, mean isn’t all there is to survival, Van,” Sublieutenant Carey Graham told him. “Ask T-rex or the slashertooth grynx.”

“That’s right,” Lynn Kosta added. “Takes smarts, too.”

“Okay, okay, listen up, people,” Commander Cole announced, breaking in. “We’re getting a feed from the Fleet CO.”

“Whoa, there,” Gerard Mario said. “Deadly Dev on line, folks.”

“Here it comes.”

An instant later, it seemed to Van as though he were standing in the large compartment aboard
Tarazed
that served as the wing’s lounge. The place wasn’t large enough for the entire wing to gather at once; to Van, it looked as though only the members of his own squadron—twelve pilots plus perhaps thirty maintenance personnel and technical staff—were present, though Cameron’s audience must in fact include everyone in the 1st Wing, nearly five hundred men and women all together. The viewall on one bulkhead showed space and graphic simulations both of the deployed squadron and of the approaching Japanese formation. Dev Cameron, wearing the two-tone grays of the new Confederation Navy and with a captain’s insignia gleaming at his throat, stood before the 3-D display. He looked, Van thought, terribly young. What was he… twenty-eight, twenty-nine standard, maybe?

But then they were
all
young.

“Within the next fifteen minutes,” Cameron said, starting off without preamble, “we are going to pull a type-one fleet encounter with six Imperial ships. The first shots have already been fired, the first maneuvers already implemented. I don’t expect that the other fellow has any nasty surprises waiting for us, not when you remember that
we
are the nasty surprise for
him.
After all, he hasn’t had time to organize anything special for us.” A polite ripple of laughter ran through the lounge. Van felt a surge of impatience, though. He was ready to
go, go…
and he damn sure didn’t need the pep talk that the high command always felt obligated to deliver.

“You people don’t need a speech from me,” Cameron went on, almost as though he’d read Van’s mind. “You know your jobs and you’re the best there are at what you do. Your squadron COs’ll already have downloaded the basic op orders to you, so you know as much as I do about what we’re trying to accomplish.

“What I do want to say, though, is that this one has to be one hundred percent. We must achieve total control of near-Alyan space so that we can land the Rangers and protect them. And if we don’t destroy, cripple, or drive off all six Imperial ships, then they’re going to be between us and our freighters back at our first entry point. If they want to, they could defeat us simply by slipping one corvette past us, heading out there and knocking off our stores ships. We’d be stuck, then, with nothing to do but turn around and go back to where we started. With rationing, we just might have enough stores left on board to make it back to Herakles, if we left right away.

“But I’m not going back to Herakles, not until I’ve carried out the orders General Sinclair gave us. We came here to enlist the help of the DalRiss in the cause we’re fighting for. I don’t intend to go back until we have it.”

The other pilots and technicians in the simulated lounge were cheering now, and Van joined in, yelling as loud as he could. The excitement was contagious. On some quieter, deeper level, he was able to analyze Cameron’s words and see them for what they were—
just
words, delivered without flourish or even emotion.

But the warflyer pilots were ready to die for the man. Van wasn’t sure he understood the phenomenon; all he knew was that there was something in Cameron’s openness and directness, in his trust of the people under his command, that Van would have followed anywhere, even to
jigoku,
the icy Japanese hell.

“We’ll do our best to cripple those ships for you,” Cameron continued, reaching out to point at the graphic display of the Imperial squadron on the viewall. “But we won’t have the time to carve them up or deliver a killing blow. That will be your job, and I’m counting on you, on
all
of you, to make sure those people don’t get through!

“Good luck! Let’s show the DalRiss what Confederation warflyers can do!”

The lounge scene faded, replaced by the darkness of the warflyer launch tube. Green lights showed readiness for launch. Julio’s voice called softly over a private channel. “Luck to you, Lieu. Take out one of them destroyers for me, eh?”

“You got it, Julio.”

“And bring my girl back in one piece, or you ’n’ me’ll have words!”

Van laughed. “Yes,
sir!”

“Gold Eagle clear for launch,” Cole announced on the primary tac channel. “Primary sequence. Thrusters to stand by.”

And then
Tarazed’s
launch officer was counting down the final seconds in Van’s ear. “And
four
and
three
and
two
and
one
and
launch!”

There was a blur of motion, and
Van’sGuard
was flung outward by a powerful, surging magnetic flux. Stars, and the dazzling glare of Alya A, exploded against Van’s awareness, with Alya A-VI a brilliant star almost dead ahead.

An ice-cold calm descended on Van, clamping down over his emotions, over his impatience and the surging exultation of being in free flight once again. He gave the mental command to fire his primary thruster, and white light exploded behind his head, driving his ship forward. Astern, the five-pearls-on-a-string bulk of the
Tarazed
dwindled rapidly until it was nothing more than a bright star. Van countered a slight roll to starboard, then fired his ventral and port thrusters to align himself on the rest of the squadron, arrowing now straight down the axis of the Confederation fleet’s course. His Warhawk’s AI painted new stars of red and green on his view of space, showing the positions of the other ships ahead. A silent flare of light there marked the detonation of an Imperial missile.

The battle proper for Alyan space had begun.

Dev relaxed into the tactical command sim, watching the battle unfold. He’d done all that he could at this point, from double-checking the position of each ship in the deployment to that final pep talk to the pilots of the 1st Wing. He hoped the speech had not been too transparent, too obvious in its inspirational flag-waving psychology. More than anything else, he felt that he’d had to say
something,
to acknowledge the bravery and loyalty of those people who were about to take eighteen-ton singleships up against Yari-class destroyers.

Much was riding on them, and on what they would be able to accomplish against very long odds indeed.

Flashes of light were flaring across his tactical display now.
Eagle’s
AI identified the flashes as a barrage of EWC-167 nanomunitions, each detonation expanding rapidly into merging, mirror silver clouds composed of trillions of microscopic flecks of crystal.

Cloudscreens, designed to reflect or scatter laser light. The Imperial fleet had ceased acceleration some time ago, so they remained behind the drifting clouds, which would render laser fire useless until they dispersed, or until the combatants were much closer than they were now.

More time passed, the range closed. The Imperials were first to fire, loosing a cloud of teleoperated missiles. At Dev’s command, countermissile fire began picking off the incoming warheads. Then the surviving missiles were close enough that point defense lasers could lock on and fire, vaporizing the swiftly accelerating missiles in soundless blossoms of light.