Symbionts (3 page)

Dev watched the glowing lines of light curving back from the target, seeking
Eagle.
Excitement thrilled through his awareness, the pulse of battle. Combat between starships took place at ranges and speeds too great for merely human minds to comprehend; the tempo was set by the AIs, the artificial intelligences that governed each ship, and which could react to sudden threats or wield laser weaponry while the electrochemical impulses warning that action was required were still crawling slowly up human optic or aural nerves. But the
shape
of the battle was determined by humans. Dev watched the spread of Imperial missiles as they began to curve inward toward the
Eagle.

It was time. “Launch Starhawk Three.”

The weapons officer’s computer-generated analogue winked out of the CDC simulation, an electronic convention reminding the others that Messier’s awareness was no longer with them in CDC, but loaded aboard the Starhawk missile now boosting toward the corvette at 50 Gs. CDC weapons control was automatically transferred to Messier’s number two, a New American lieutenant named Lerran Dole.

“Fire control reports PDLs coming on-line,” Lieutenant Commander Charl Fletcher,
Eagle’s
combat direction officer, reported. PDLs—point defense lasers—were a warship’s primary defense against remote-piloted missiles like the Starhawk.

“I’m reading
Teshio’s
PDLs on-line as well,” Grier announced. “And they’re rotating their ship to give their AI the best shot with the largest number of batteries. Estimate fifteen PDL batteries will have clear fields of fire at our Starhawk.”

“That’s okay,” Dev said. “Let ’em.” Starhawk Three would not be coming close enough to its target to trigger its AI-controlled antimissile defenses.

Minutes passed, the starpoints on the 3-D display slowly shifting relative positions. The red graphics marking the Starhawks drifted more quickly, swiftly bridging the narrowing gap between
Eagle
and the Japanese warship.
Teshio’s
missiles had been launched first, but they’d been launched on widely dispersed paths in order to split up the destroyer’s point defense batteries. They would reach
Eagle
at almost the same moment that
Eagle’s
Starhawk reached the
Teshio.

“I’m within canister range,” Messier’s voice announced suddenly, as new targeting graphics winked on in the air above the CDC projector, bracketing the
Teshio.
“Targeting aft fuel tankage spaces and maneuvering jets. Detonation in three… two… one…
fire!”

Starhawk canister warheads were a new twist to an ancient idea. As the missile closed with the target, its orientation precisely controlled by laser sensors and the controller-AI link, a fifty-kilo charge of high explosive detonated, shredding the missile and propelling a cloud of marble-sized ball bearings in a titanic shotgun blast. Already traveling with a relative velocity of tens of kilometers per second, the shot received an additional kick from the explosion. Triggered by proximity alert sensors,
Teshio’s
PDLs flared in rapid-fire pulses, but where an instant before there’d been a single target, now there were hundreds… too many for the corvette’s defenses to handle in the scant seconds remaining before impact.

“Incoming missiles entering PDL reaction zone,” Fletcher announced. He might have been announcing shipboard time.
“Eagle’s
PDLs are firing.”

“Watch it!” Dole added, and his voice betrayed the high-keyed pitch of his tension. “One’s coming—”

A dazzling, white sphere of static engulfed the combat display, momentarily blotting out the moving symbols. There was no sound, no sensation of shock or blast, but Dev knew a nuke warhead had just detonated close enough aboard to fry some of
Eagle’s
sensors.

But they were still in the fight or they wouldn’t be wondering about it. As the static from the nuclear detonation cleared, the graphics reappeared on the combat display. An instant later, the shotgun blast from
Eagle’s
Starhawk reached its target.

Every projectile massed thirty grams and was moving at a velocity of twenty-five thousand meters per second relative to the target. When they struck
Teshio’s
hull, each bore a transitional kinetic energy of 9.4 million joules, equivalent to the detonation of just under two kilograms of TNT.

That was insignificant compared to the fury that had just brushed lightly across
Eagle’s
hull, a blast equal to some one thousand tons of TNT. But this time there were dozens of solid strikes instead of one near miss, scattered across the aft half of the corvette. The image of
Teshio
transmitted from Remote Five lit up with a ragged pattern of dazzlingly bright, white pinpoints. Most of the canister in the expanding cone of shot missed the corvette completely, but those that hit gouged craters in armor, pierced cryo-H tanks like bullets hurtling through plyboard, and peeled back duralloy hull plates in a silent, deadly storm of high-energy hail. Cryo-H—slush hydrogen held at near-absolute zero temperatures—boiled as kinetic energy was transformed into heat and fuel tank walls glowed red hot. Impact, and the sudden gush of hydrogen into space, set
Teshio
tumbling slowly end over end, as a slowly expanding cloud of metallic debris glittered in the sunlight.

His link with the Starhawk broken at the instant of detonation, Messier had reappeared with the other CDC officers. “Hit,” he reported.

“Teshio
has lost maneuvering control,” Kelly Grier announced. “They still have power and weapons on-line.”

“CDO!” Dev snapped. “Report on those Impie missiles!”

“Our PDLs took out three of them,” Fletcher replied a moment later. “The fourth detonated short, just out of effective range. That could have been due to damage from a sublethal PDL hit, or it might have been deliberate strategy, hoping to hurt us with the EMP and blast effects.”

“What’s the bill?”

“Damage control reports only minor damage to external hull, frame seven and forward. No breaches, no radiation, no casualties.”

Dev let out a small sigh.
Eagle
might be many times larger than the little
Teshio,
but size alone meant little when the other guy had nukes. But they’d survived… this time.

“Communications,” Dev said. “Set up that com channel now. Let’s see if they’ll talk to us.”

Normally, of course, the Imperials would not even consider negotiating with rebels, especially with help, in the shape of an Imperial squadron, already on the way.
Teshio
was damaged, but not yet out of the fight… and if the corvette’s commander had any more nukes aboard, he might easily get lucky.

But now that he’d gotten the guy’s attention, Dev had an idea that might make
Teshio’
s commander agree to almost anything.

The thrill of combat singing through his mind, Dev began downloading a new analogue for himself.

Chapter 2

Though fraud in other activities is detestable, in the management of war it is laudable and glorious, and he who overcomes an enemy by fraud is as much to be praised as he who does so by force.

—
Discourses

Niccolo Machiavelli

C.E.
1517

The crippled
Teshio
lay between
Eagle
and the fleeing freighter and had to be neutralized fast, or the Confederation destroyer risked facing another missile strike. With Imperial reinforcements already boosting clear from New American orbit, Dev had time to take the corvette or the freighter, but not both. An invisible beam of low-energy laser light tagged the Imperial ship, as Dev issued a chain of mental commands, assuming the appearance of a very special, newly programmed ViRcom analogue.

Analogues were AI-generated programs used in ViRcommunications and in workstation simulations such as
Eagle’s
CDC. Normally, an analogue resembled the person “wearing” it, though for a few extra kiloyen or with the help of someone skilled at reality programming, it could be spruced up with richer or fancier clothing, more attractive physical features, or the background trappings of wealth or power. A personal analogue’s appearance, in fact, was one of the more important social markers throughout the
shakai,
the upper-class culture of Imperial society that had left its imprint on most of the cultures throughout the Shichiju.

There was nothing to stop a user from radically changing his analogue’s appearance save convention and the social risks of being found out. In fact, some such changes were obligatory. Enhancing certain aspects of one’s own body for virtual sex involving two or more players, for instance, was considered quite proper, at least within certain boundaries of taste, physical compatibility, and believability. In combat, however, virtual communications were generally kept more or less honest, if only because extensive data bases on both sides could be used to check on exaggerated claims, threats, personal identities, or boasts of military prowess. A lieutenant, for instance, who impersonated a captain through a reprogrammed analogue in order to impress an opponent ran the risk of being found out and ignored. Such an imposter was
sho ga nai,
literally beyond help, and if he was captured, he could be killed.

More than once in the past, though, in situations where he thought he could get away with it, Dev had deliberately used false-front analogues to deceive the enemy; in particular, he’d worn a computer-generated analogue of a Japanese naval officer to carry off a deception that allowed
Eagle,
a Japanese warship until her capture at Eridu, to masquerade as an Imperial destroyer, slipping unchallenged into the midst of an Imperial squadron.

He wouldn’t be able to try that particular trick again, of course. The Imperials had figured out what he’d done soon after he’d carried it off, and they would be on the lookout for such deceptions from now on. The thing had been possible at all only because he’d managed to acquire the Imperial access codes for that particular fleet operation. Likely, too, they’d changed the IFF codes on all of their fleet units, making impersonations of Imperial officers or their ships almost impossible.

What he was trying now was similar in application to those earlier deceptions… but quite different in spirit. Judging from their maneuvers so far, the Imperials clearly knew the lone destroyer was a Confederation raider. But they couldn’t be sure of their opponent’s exact nature.

Within the shadow world of his awareness, Dev’s 185-centimeter frame grew taller, approaching two full meters, while dwindling in mass to an almost skeletal lankiness. His skin turned black, his lengthening hair and thickening eyebrows an iridescent white. His outward appearance completely transformed, Dev opened the readied ViRcom channel to the Japanese corvette.

Since Dev had initiated the link, an image of
Teshio’s
bridge became the backdrop for the meeting. Though the reality aboard the damaged corvette must by this time be a confusion of zero-G, smoke, and pressure loss alarms, the scene showed no urgency. The looming bulk of the bridge link modules crowded one another beneath a low, conduit-covered overhead. Only one figure was visible, the image of a Japanese naval officer in formal dress blacks. The link program maintained the illusion of gravity.

“This is
Shosa
Ohira, of the Imperial corvette
Teshio,”
the figure said stiffly, facing Dev. “I demand—”

“You will demand nothing,” Dev interrupted, barking the phrase in Nihongo. He waited then, allowing Ohira to see and understand the image before him now. The Imperial’s analogue would not betray its owner through any physical change in expression, of course, but Dev did see the man’s eyes widen slightly and guessed that Ohira knew what was confronting him.

“Teshio!
I am Captain Kwasa of the Confederation destroyer
Ya Kutisha.
You will release computer control to me immediately, or you will be destroyed.”

“This… is piracy,” Ohira said. The hesitation, the rasp in his words betrayed his confusion and his fear. He was a young man, in his early thirties, Dev guessed, and not practiced at hiding his emotions. “Piracy! I cannot surrender to
you!”

There was a world within the Shichiju, innermost planet of a red dwarf flare star called UV Ceti and known to its Swahili-speaking inhabitants as Juanyekundu, Red Star. Exploited for its mineral resources with Imperial help almost three centuries before by a consortium of African nations, the world had been abandoned, its colonists left to shift for themselves, because evacuating them would have been too dangerous and too expensive an undertaking for the then brand-new Hegemony. UV Ceti was a dim-glowing coal of a sun circling another red dwarf only marginally brighter than itself nine light-years from Earth; it was also a flare star, given to periodic seizures when a tiny portion of its surface suddenly and briefly erupted in a storm of light and hard radiation, drastically increasing the star’s brightness.

Very few of those first colonists had survived; the descendants of those who did lived in deep-tunneled habitats kilometers beneath their world’s airless surface, but those first few generations had undergone a rather brutal selection process. Modern Juanyekundans tended to have a high tolerance for radiation, as well as the physiques and the hair and skin colorations unique now to natives of the planet. Those descendants also possessed a singular hatred for the Empire, their ancestors’ betrayer, and despite its isolationist tendencies, Juanyekundu had been among the first of the Shichiju’s worlds to side openly with the Confederation by signing the Declaration of Reason.

Unfortunately, Juanyekundu was a poor world that possessed no warships of its own. There was no
Ya Kutisha
—the name was Swahili for “Terrible”—and Captain Kwasa was a fiction of
Eagle’s
AI. Dev was counting, however, on whatever stories Commander Ohira had heard about the Juanyekundans’ hatred for the Japanese, as well as on the physically impressive display they made over a ViRcom link. “Kwasa” towered over
Teshio’s
captain, his head brushing the low overhead.