Battlemind (25 page)

The problem, as Dev knew well, was that with virtually unlimited numbers the Web had little need of formal combat tactics. Throw enough metal at a defensive force, and unless that force had unlimited reserves of its own to draw on, it would break, sooner or later.

And that was precisely the tactics the Web appeared to be employing. Unseen by his unsuspecting shipmates, Dev monitored the intelligence feed to the big battle tank in
Yamato’s
Operations Center, a ten-meter pit with a holographic interface with the ship’s primary Artificial Intelligence. Unnoted either by the AI or by the humans working the tank controls, Dev was able to electronically peer over their shoulders, watching the battle unfold in the emptiness far ahead.

As had happened at Nova Aquila, the Web machines were materializing out of empty space, not all at once or in any kind of recognizable formation, but a few at a time, as though they were being fed into the Stargate device back at the Galactic Core as quickly as they could be rushed into position. As they emerged out of nothingness, they began accelerating in-system, gathering slowly into a vast and still-growing cloud of Web combat craft.

Dev used his position aboard the
Yamato
to carefully scan the enemy masses, searching for recognizable ship designs, for a repeat of earlier tactics, for anything that could provide him with intelligence into the inhuman mind of this foe. The Battle of Nova Aquila had been won two years before because the human forces had been able to identify and destroy key command and coordination facilities that appeared to have been directing Web battle tactics, but so far Dev had seen no ships or structures that evenly remotely resembled the enormous fleet control units he’d seen then. The planetoid ships that had apparently been coordinating the Web attack then were missing, which meant that in the past two years, the Web had analyzed their earlier defeat and found a way to avoid that same weakness.

That was one of the problems with technic war; if the enemy was any good at all, he would stay flexible, figure out what had gone wrong before, and fix it… which left his opponent trying to find some new weakness, some new angle of attack.

The trouble was, Dev was pretty much a helpless observer, literally along for the ride as an unnoted electronic stowaway aboard the Imperial flagship. He could watch, but his resolution of the enemy machines and formations was limited to the resolving power of
Yamato’s
sensory suite and by
Yamato’s
own movements. Clearly, Admiral Kurebayashi was racing to place as many Imperial Navy ships in the cloud’s path as he could, hoping to halt its advance as far away from Earth as possible.

Dev had faced the Web in combat and knew that Kurebayashi’s little squadron—two ryu-carriers, a dozen cruisers, thirty-one destroyers, frigates, and smaller craft, as well as the aging
Yamato
herself—would be little more than a snack for the hungry Web swarm.

Lead elements of the cloud were just beginning to reach Perimeter Defense Facility
Evening Calm,
a deep-space watch outpost beyond the orbit of Neptune and well above the ecliptic, designed to monitor and challenge incoming spacecraft. In the battle tank,
Evening Calm
was represented by a bright red pinpoint of light that lay, by chance, almost directly in the projected path of the diffuse, purple-colored haze representing the Web cloud. A frail structure, an open latticework of crisscrossing struts and beams that served as an immense antennae array two kilometers across,
Evening Calm
was larger by far than the largest spacecraft but massed only a few thousand tons. A rotating wheel habitat at one end provided quarters and life support for a crew of twelve, while most of the rest of the station’s mass was wrapped up in the open-mesh dish of the main tracking antenna, the sensor arrays, and the supporting framework. Though the station was primarily designed as a deep space observation post and communications relay and not as a fortress, it did possess a battery of military lasers.

The station’s weapons seemed pitifully inadequate, however, in the face of the swarm descending toward them out of interstellar space.

Images of the Web cloud were being transmitted from
Evening Calm
to the
Yamato’s
operations center and displayed on a viewall screen that occupied most of one of the compartment’s large bulkheads. When they’d first begun arriving, the Web combat machines had been invisible at optical wavelengths, but like vapor coalescing out of thin air, their presence was slowly materializing as a kind of thin, wispy silver-gray fog that steadily grew denser as it hurtled toward the perimeter station.

As Dev translated the digital information into a scene he could play inside his own mind, he saw immediately the wispy smear of the attackers, growing visibly larger second by second in the center of the display. The cloud was translucent, like a puff of smoke, thin enough that brighter stars could still be seen through the haze, but it was rapidly growing thicker as millions of separate Web machines continued to swell the main cloud’s numbers.

The leading edge of the swarm grew near, the range, shown by numerals ticking off a kind of fast-paced countdown at the lower right of the image, grew steadily less. Dev heard the station’s commander gave a crisp order, and the lasers winked on; twelve hundred kilometers away, Webbers caught in that megajoule beam shone with the light of tiny, glaring suns, then faded away in a silent puff of vapor. Someone aboard
Evening Calm
cheered and was immediately silenced by a sharp-barked order.

The lasers fired again, and once more a constellation of brilliant stars appeared in the distance, flared bright, then faded.

The cloud had taken losses… but those losses were literally a few drops out of the ocean; the rest of the Webbers kept coming, each impelled by powerful magnetic fields that let them sense the ferrous mass of the station and home on it with the single-minded purpose of a swarm of hungry mosquitoes.

And then the Web force had arrived, the lead elements streaking past the
Evening Calm
facility at velocities of hundreds of kilometers per second. Many struck the open latticework of the facility, and each strike was like the detonation of a small bomb as the kinetic energy of the fast-traveling devices was liberated by high-speed impact. The external camera view jittered and bounced wildly; something, one of the machines, possibly, or more likely a fragment of wreckage, sailed past the camera’s field of vision like a great, whirling black shadow.

After that first storm of explosions, however, more and more of the Webbers began coming in more slowly, decelerating at what must have been hundreds of gravities, with oddly jointed mechanical limbs wide-stretched to snag hold of the station’s structure.

Dev had been in combat with the Web more than once; each time before he’d been struck by the similarities between that attack and the blind rush of antibodies attacking foreign cells, a host of invading bacteria, perhaps, inside the human body, and that impression was stronger than ever now. They swarmed in blindly, many missing their target entirely, others hitting and grabbing on with a bewildering variety of claspers, arms, and many-jointed legs.

Throughout the storm, the station’s lasers kept firing as quickly as they could cycle, but there were just too many of the attackers for the weapons to even slow the onslaught, and there were no good targets at all. The individual Web ships—devices, really—of that oncoming cloud were mostly small. The largest were a few meters long and massed perhaps a ton or two. Most were smaller; many were the size of a man’s hand and massed only a few hundred grams. These last were designed with one purpose only, to seek out and attach themselves to any larger target and begin dismantling it a few molecules at a time, literally eating their way through solid hull metal with nanotechnic disassemblers—nano-D in military parlance. Through outboard cameras on the
Evening Calm
facility, Dev saw the first of those glittering objects strike the station’s framework, strike and cling, gleaming like silver-edged jewels in the harsh glare of exterior spotlights. In seconds, ragged patches had appeared in the station’s exterior thermal coating; in seconds more, whole lengths of strut piping were breaking off and spinning away into space.

A window opened in the upper left corner of the transmitted image. A young
sho-i
appeared, his face frightened. Behind him, the station’s command center showed wild panic as members of the facility’s crew stampeded for the airlock door to the escape pods.

“We’re breaking up!”
he cried into the camera, eyes wide. In the background, Dev could hear the ominous creak of metal flexed and stressed beyond its engineering limits.
“We can’t stop it! Do you hear me, Command? We can’t stop
—”

The picture broke up in a storm of static; both the internal and external views broke off as data feeds or cameras were knocked off-line.

“I2C transmission from
Evening Calm
has been lost,” a voice aboard the
Yamato
reported with eerie calm.

“Transmit to all units,”
Taisho
Kurebayashi said gravely. In the operations tank, the red pinpoint of light marking the
Evening Calm
winked out as a spreading, purple haze engulfed it. “We will attempt to meet the cloud at approximately the orbit of Jupiter, on a line between the cloud’s current position and Earth.”

“Hai, O-Taishosama!”
a communications officer replied. Dev sensed the order as it was beamed back to an Imperial communications center on Phobos.

It was time for him to leave as well. There was nothing he could do to help
Yamato
or her consorts, nothing he could do at all save continue gathering data, and what he’d seen so far had probably given him all of the data he could use. In the ops battle tank, it was becoming obvious that the Web had initiated a change in their strategy, and that intrigued him. When they’d appeared in the Gr’tak system, according to Sholai, they’d appeared as a single large vessel that had accelerated in-system, divided itself in two, then further subdivided into clouds of machines deployed as separate fleets, one vectoring in on the Gr’tak homeworld, the other making for the suns. For some reason, the Web attack here was being launched as vast numbers of separate machines working in close concert with one another.

From what the DalRiss had been able to gather, the Web had employed a different strategy at the DalRiss sun, with hundreds of thousands of Webbers appearing out of empty space and plunging straight into the sun… and within a few days, triggering the nova that had eradicated the entire system.

Why the difference? Did it have to do with the defense that the locals put up? Or had Web strategy changed in the millennia since they’d scorched the Gr’tak homeworld? As he studied the purple cloud projected into the ops center battle tank, Dev could already detect a faint shift in the cloud’s shape as it paired itself into two lobes. If it followed the pattern seen at the Gr’tak home system, the cloud would soon be two separate, smaller clouds, one heading for Earth, the other aimed at the Sun.

Dev felt a throbbing, urgent restlessness that swiftly grew into barely contained panic; he’d been an electronic download for close to three decades now… and before that his allegiance had been to the Confederation. If he ever thought of himself as having a home world any more, that world was New America; 26 Draconis IV had been both the spiritual and material focus for the rebellion against Empire and Hegemony in the first place.

But Dev had been born on Earth, and his roots were there, on Man’s original homeworld. He’d been born and raised in the Scranton District of the big, sprawling, eastern seaboard metropolis of the North American Protectorate. His mother still lived there, though he hadn’t seen her for many years; his brother Greg… now
there
was someone he’d not thought of in a while! Greg had been in Imperial service thirty years ago; God alone knew where he was now. It was possible, even likely, that he was back on Earth again.

And Earth was about to be destroyed when her sun was artificially detonated by the Web.

Though he’d thought little about Earth for a long time, Dev found that the knowledge hurt, and hurt badly. He could remember talks with his father in a West Scranton park… remember long walks in the hills outside of the city wards… remember, now that he called the sensations to mind, even the taste of the air after a spring rain, the laughter of children playing in the street, the caress of a breeze on his face.

It was harshly, bitterly ironic. At the time, he’d wanted nothing more and nothing less than to get off of Earth and never go back. His father had been in Imperial service, one of a handful of gaijin at that time allowed to transfer from Hegemony service to the Imperial Navy; he’d been required to divorce Dev’s mother, however, as part of the political price of his advancement. He’d accepted, because only that way could he continue supporting his wife and sons, who lived in one of the more savagely depressed economic zones of the Earth.

Later, though, his father had been disgraced… and Dev had pulled all the strings he could to get off of Earth and start his life over somewhere, anywhere else. That determination had led him eventually to Loki, and to his joining the Hegemony military, where he’d become a warstrider.

Never,
never
in his wildest imaginings in all of the years since had he thought he would ever feel either sorrow or nostalgia for the planet that had given him birth. But he did.…

Dev felt himself a part of humanity in that moment as he had never felt it before; the loss Mankind as a whole would know with the loss of Earth and her teeming billions would sear the consciousness of the survivors, would traumatize the entire race in ways that simply could not be predicted.
Is this what the DalRiss felt when their worlds were destroyed?
Dev wondered. Can we survive such a loss? DalRiss psychology was so alien from that of humans that it was difficult to compare the reactions of the two to the same event.