Jackers (40 page)

The only ploy he could think of now was to hit the ships in orbit. Could he disable a starship the same way he’d knocked out the Imperial assault striders? It ought to be possible, if he could find a communications frequency and patch himself in. Vast power remained in reserve within the body of the Naga, which filled much of the generator mountain beneath his feet now, and extended far off beneath the crust and around the curve of the planet.

He reached out… searching for linkage with one of the Imperial vessels.…

Aboard
Mogami,
one of four Kako-class cruisers, computer systems began shutting down by themselves, one by one in rapid succession. The ship’s AI began to describe what was happening… a virus program of some sort had insinuated itself into
Mogami’s
link network by piggybacking its way aboard on a communications carrier channel… and then the AI switched itself off, an electronic suicide.

Taisa
Hijiri Ushiba was just groping his way up out of the embrace of his linkage slot after being unceremoniously booted off the link network when a bridge alarm began to shrill.

“Taisasan!”
His second-in-command was floundering in midair, panic distorting his features.
“Taisasan!
The power tap!”

“I hear it, damn it!”

But how to respond with the computers shut down? Cold sweat broke out on Ushiba’s face, spinning away in tiny, weightless, silver spheres as he shook his head. The alarm was the cascade alert, an indicator that the singularities were being called into existence within the ship’s power tap chambers.

If
Mogami’s
computers were off-line, there was no way to tune the harmonic frequency of those spinning singularities. The micro black holes would go out of control.…

He had to reestablish control over the ship’s primary power system. Thrusting himself back into the link couch, he brought his palm down on the interface. Possibly there was still a partial network. If he could access the right codes…

There! He was in! He sensed his chief engineering officer next to him within the virtual reality of the ship’s network. In front of him, a computer graphic representing the otherworldly strangeness deep within the ship’s power core glowed with ghostly light. Two dazzling pinpoints of stark and scintillating radiance circled one another so quickly that their image dissolved into a white ring of sparkling light. Energy, the heat and hard radiation of the core of a star was already starting to flood through the gap.…

“Can you scram the power tap, Engineer?”

“I’m trying, damn it, I’m trying! I don’t even understand how it came—”

“WATCH OUT!”

Through his linkage, Ushiba saw the singularity pair going unstable. The image had been slowed somewhat to enable the human eye to perceive it, and therefore lagged behind reality. He never saw the final collapse, as one singularity evaporated in a blinding flash of raw energy.

The second micro black hole, slingshotted forward when its partner had vanished, tunneled through energy receptors and superconducting coils, through magnetic screens and plasma containment fields, through lead and iridium and polyceramic insulator shielding, a fast-moving, fiercely radiating pinpoint.

Traveling like a bullet, the singularity enthusiastically puckered the very shape of space around it as it plowed through electronic circuitry and bulkheads, air and human beings, steadily gaining mass as it devoured the heart of the
Mogami.
Hard radiation, gamma and X rays, flooded the inhabited portion of the ship as matter crowded down that hungry, molecule-sized gullet and vanished. It didn’t have sufficient mass to swallow the entire ship, but between its radiation output and the gravitational tides wreaking havoc with her support struts and hull, the cruiser was doomed.

Mogami,
her hull structure stressed far beyond her engineering specs, shrieked.…

“Chujosan!”

“I see it,” Kawashima snapped back. “Order all ships to shut down communications instantly!”

“But—”

“Do it, then kill
Donryu’s
communications! They’re infecting our AI programming!”

“Hai, Chujosan!”

Mogami,
a six-hundred-meter-long, black-hulled cigar of duralloy armor and advanced nanotechnics, was
crumpling
before his virtual eyes, victim of a terrible engineering failure. An instant later, the rogue singularity emerged near the bow, a dazzling point of light hurtling out of orbit and into space.

Then the microsingularity evaporated in a burst of gamma rays and ultraviolet and visible light, a silent, dazzling explosion that washed across the hulls of every ship in the squadron, starkly illuminating them as though in the glare of an exploding sun.

“They’re getting at our computers through the communications links, somehow,” Kawashima said, more to himself than to his bewildered staff officers. “Helm! Power up! Take us out of orbit!”

They had to put some distance between this new rebel weapon and the squadron.

“Chujosan!”
Eto, his chief of staff, called. “You’re leaving the rest of the squadron?”

“When they see us leaving orbit, they will follow,” Kawashima replied coldly. “If they do not, they will die.”

“And our people on the ground?” The commanding officer of
Donryu’s
marine contingent was furious.
“Chujo!
You are abandoning them!”

“They’ll have to look out for themselves,” Kawashima said coldly. “Until we figure out a way to counter this…
thing.”

“Engineering! Give us full thrust!”

“Hai, Chujosan!”

Dev could no longer reach the Imperial warships in synchorbit.
Mogami’s
destruction had left him triumphantly exultant at the length of his reach… and frustrated at having that reach cut short. The Nihonjin squadron commander had guessed too soon how Dev had been affecting his ship’s computers and shut down all radio and laser-borne communication. True, he was now cut off from his forces on the ground, and his ships were cut off from one another, a mob rather than a fleet… but Dev had felt those ships right
here,
within the closing of his hand, to be crushed out of existence.

Reprogramming was too slow, and vulnerable to a simple closing of a physical circuit. There had to be another way… and fast! Fast! Turning his enhanced gaze skyward, he could see
Donryu
already accelerating out of orbit, big, slow and clumsy, balanced on a silent flare of star-hot plasma.

Think! If you’ve suddenly grown so creative…
think!

Momentarily, he turned his gaze inward. The vast bulk of the Naga was spilling from the mountain like cold, black lava, emerging at last from the secret privacy of its hidden caverns. It drank in the sunlight. Crude, newly shaped eyeballs rippled and swelled and opened along its surface, surveying surroundings cold and alien.

Seeing was joy, a new Event.

*I/we see…

**You/we can generate powerful magnetic fields.

*Yes. For movement, for…

**… navigation, for…

*… for launching the Will-be-Selves into…

**… the Void, yes. That is what we will do.

*The Will-be-Selves are not…

**… ready, of course. I have other missiles.

*What?

**These.…

*Rock…

Kawashima turned his full attention to the virtual image of the planet, hanging now like a great blue-and-gold sphere astern of
Donryu’s
plasma flare. As that flare grew hotter, its radiation might well sweep across that part of the surface on the equator where rebels and Imperial Marines still struggled.

So long as the weapon that had reached out and crushed
Mogami
was destroyed as well, it didn’t really matter. He would have liked to have taken Sinclair and the other Confederation leaders captive back to Earth, but the rebellion would be satisfactorily resolved if the leaders were killed, their fleet broken and scattered.

Something very strange was happening to the Heraklean surface.

The atmosphere just north of the Augean Peninsula had taken on a peculiar quality, glowing with an auroral light, sweeping around and around in a vortex of clouds that throbbed and pulsed with yellow lightnings.

Buddha and all my ancestors… what is happening there?

Lightning flared below, silent and vast.…

Katya was hurled to the ground by the shock wave, which left her gasping, her breath sucked from her lungs. God… what had she just seen? Shaking her head, trying to clear it, she looked up as the wind whipped and shrieked across her back.

Every man and woman on that ridgetop was down, Confederation prisoners and Imperial captors alike. There were no soldiers or prisoners any longer, only people struggling to survive in a wind gone mad. Beyond, kilometers beyond the ridgetop, the triangular shape of the atmosphere generator was wreathed in flickering, violet lightnings, as overhead, black clouds swirled about in a vast, dynamic whirlpool, the storm’s eye centered above the apex of the pyramid.

The air crawled, against her skin, and her hair stood on end. The storm—such understatement in a word!—was causing frightful charges to build up in the atmosphere. Another flash of lightning, searingly brilliant, and she blinked hard against the green-and-purple afterimage. She
must
have imagined that; an instant before she’d gone blind, she’d thought she’d seen something peeling off the side of the mountain, then streaking skyward so fast that nothing could be seen but a bright, dazzlingly blue bolt of light.

Moments later, the sonic boom hit, but Katya never heard it.

She was already deaf as well as blind.

“Collision alert!”

“Point defense!”

“Too late!”
Donryu’s
weapons officer sounded as though he was about to lose all control. “Damn it, too
late!
”

“Point defense on automatic!” Kawashima snapped. “Analysis! What
was
that thing?”

“A rock,
Chujosan,” Donryu’s
captain replied.

“Nonsense!” the Exec protested. “You don’t throw rocks from the
bottom
of a gravity well!”

Kawashima was already replaying the image in his ViRsimulation, slowing down the speed by a factor of nearly a thousand. Gonichi Obayashi was right. It
had
been a rock… or, at least, a large mass of partly molten iron, scooped off the surface of the planet somehow and hurled into space. Its brief passage through atmosphere had heated it white-hot; its velocity as it passed
Donryu,
missing by a scant thousand kilometers, had been nearly one-tenth the speed of light.

Modern military literature contained many references to an old, old idea. In any war where one side controlled the high ground of space, bombardment of planet-bound forces became simplicity itself, so long as you didn’t mind running the risk of altering the planet’s climate. All you needed were a few small asteroids nudged into proper intercept orbits, or just a mass of nickel-iron large enough to survive the fiery plummet through atmosphere. A fair-sized asteroid had changed the face and the climate of Earth some sixty-five million years ago and driven the dinosaurs to extinction. Even a small asteroid dropped from orbit could annihilate a city.

But the advantage was supposed to be with the force in orbit. A planet was a damn poor place to throw rocks from… about like standing at the bottom of a deep, dry well and chucking rocks at somebody looking down from above. The chucker was more likely to get one of his own missiles back in his face than he was to hit the target.

But the rebels had somehow found a way of accelerating several tons of iron to a velocity of thirty-thousand kilometers per second. There’d been no time to dodge, no time to do anything but automatically record the missile’s passage.

And, oh gods of my fathers, it’s happening again!…

The lightnings gathered. The storm winds howled. Dev looked skyward, sharing his symbiont’s newfound vision sense, relying on infrared and mass sense as the clouds swirled in.

**You/we almost had him that time. You/we…

*… must adjust my/our aiming point to allow for…

**… the target’s movement, exactly.

*Ready.

**Now!

A one-ton chunk of iron and fabricrete, part of the support structure of the man-made mountain itself, tore free as powerful magnetic fields focused along its length and pulled, accelerating it in the wink of an eye. Lightning forked overhead; with a thunderclap of raw sound, the jagged missile vanished in a bar of blue-white radiance.

Kawashima saw the second launch but had no time to analyze it, no time even to shout warning. Nine-tenths of a second after it left the planet’s surface, the block of half-molten slag slammed into the heavy cruiser
Zintu,
in orbit some five thousand kilometers away. Traveling at thirty-thousand kilometers per second, the projectile was moving too fast for the staid, low-velocity Newtonian mechanics of
E=1/2mv
²
.
The kinetic energy released on impact could only be calculated by the more familiar
E=mc
²
,
an equation that yielded roughly 10
¹⁹
joules.

Such numbers are meaningless; say, rather, that one thousand twenty-megaton nuclear warheads were detonated simultaneously.
Zintu
did not crumple or glow or burn. She was simply
gone…
and in her place stood a small and short-lived sun. Briefly, the Imperial fleet was bathed in the actinic glare that touched and dissolved those vessels nearest the ill-fated cruiser.

“We must get away!” Kawashima screamed into the link. “Engage the power tap!”