Symbionts (17 page)

“My God,” Katya said, her voice so low that Dev barely caught it. “You sure don’t believe in putting any pressure on your people, do you?”

If Sinclair heard her words, he ignored them. Dev said nothing, his mind was racing. He ought, he told himself, to tell Morton and Sinclair that he was not the man to lead the Confederation squadron, that it would be better—
safer
—to assign him to one of the ships remaining at Herakles. There were other senior officers better qualified than he—Admiral Herren, for instance, or Captain Jase Curtis of the
Tarazed
—people who did not question their own sanity.

As Dev had recently begun questioning his.

Chapter 11

Individuality is alien to Naga thought. With only a single organism occupying a given world, that organism believes itself to be the sole intelligence in its entire universe; indeed, for the Naga, intelligence and self are indistinguishable concepts. In the course of its explorations of its universe, a Naga will “bud” pieces of itself as scouts capable of independent action and thought, scouts that return to the parent body the memory of the scout’s wanderings. By building on this experience, planetary Nagas can form conceptual analogue-pictures of separate entities, each with a unique viewpoint and history. This requires considerable flexibility on the Naga’s part, however, far more than that required, say, by a member of one human culture attempting to understand the point of view of someone raised with a different cultural world view.

—
Intelligent Expectations

Dr. James Phillip Kantor

C.E.
2542

Thirty-two thousand kilometers above Herakles, the Imperial fleet decelerated into synchronous orbit. The planet, half-full, gleamed in the warm yellow light of Mu Herculis, its seas blue and violet, its clouds and polar ice caps gleaming white with golden highlights.

The fleet, designated Ohka Squadron, consisted of nineteen warships ranging in size from eight-hundred-ton Hari-class corvettes to the flagship, a Ryu-class carrier, massing two million tons and just short of one thousand meters in length. Nudged by brief flashes from maneuvering jets, the armada deployed, the ships spreading out across six thousand kilometers of empty space. Blocks of data flickered and shifted next to the images of the various ships, information telling of vectors, relative velocities, and combat readiness.

The scene, portrayed through virtual reality, was being experienced by a number of observers, an invisible gallery of onlookers whose vantage point shifted back and forth among three of those orbiting Imperial warships. They included captains and department heads from several vessels; senior was
Chujo
Takeshi Miyagi, commander in chief of Otori Squadron. Among the watchers was the bright and tactically innovative
Shosho
Tomiji Kima, commanding officer of the flagship
Karyu,
the
Fire Dragon.
Kima had been
Karyu’s
Executive Officer under Miyagi until eight months ago, when Miyagi had been promoted to full admiral and given command of Otori Squadron.

“At this point,” a voice was telling the watchers in
Nihongo,
“the Ryu-class carrier and two of the cruisers have already begun their bombardment of the rebel position on the planet’s surface. So far, there is no response from the enemy on the ground.”

Kima studied the data displays carefully, encoding ship positions and deployments within his personal RAM for future study on his own. Later, too, he would examine in detail the disposition of the squadron’s marine warstriders and infantry on the surface. This ViRsimulation would be restricted to the battle, if such it could be called, fought in orbit over Herakles some four months earlier.

One of the ships, he noticed, one of the four big Kako-class cruisers, was in trouble.

“It was at this point that something went badly wrong,” the voice continued. The speaker, Kima knew, was
Shosa
Chokugen Takaji, the fleet’s senior military intelligence specialist. “We believe that the rebels were able somehow to take over
Mogami’s
engineering AIs and instigate a quantum power tap start-up.”

“I don’t understand,
Shosasan,”
another voice said. “How could turning on a QPT be considered a weapon?”

“Obviously,
Imadasan,”
Admiral Miyagi said, replying for the
shosa,
“you xenosophontologists are taught nothing about starship engineering or power core operation.” A ripple of polite laughter sounded from the other unseen watchers.

“Quite so,” the intelligence officer said. “The QPT uses paired, artificially generated microsingularities to extract energy from the quantum plenum. These are molecule-sized black holes orbiting one another at speeds approaching that of light, and with mutual, finely tuned harmonic resonances. They are rarely used in close proximity to a planet, since local gravity fields distort the shape of space and can affect that harmonic tuning. Somehow, we presume through one of our own communications bands, someone on the surface linked with
Mogami’s
AI, started up the power tap, and then ordered the computer to shut down. Without the computer to tune the singularities’ harmonics from microsecond to microsecond within a gravitational well, they went random and initiated an uncontrolled power cascade. One evaporated in a burst of energy. Note the readings there on the right. Intense X rays and gamma radiation are flooding
Mogami’s
engineering spaces.”

Indeed, the readings taken from a nearby ship had gone off the scale. A schematic diagram drew itself in an empty patch of space nearby, sketching in the interior spaces of the six-hundred-meter cigar that was
Mogami.
The observers watched as the cruiser’s engineering decks began crumpling inward, the pace of the vessel’s destruction slowed to a fraction of its realtime pace.

Implacably, the voice continued, describing the cruiser’s death. “With the evaporation of one microsingularity, of course, the second was flung clear in a gravitational slingshot effect at relativistic speeds. It was moving more slowly by the time it left the ship. Repeated interactions with
Mogami’s
interior structure slowed it significantly as it passed along the cruiser’s length, devouring armor, hull metal, bulkheads, circuitry, crew members, and anything else that happened to lie in its path before emerging…
there.”

Mogami
and its transparent cutaway view both were crumpling as the observers watched, the one a mirror to the other. A dazzling point of light emerged from just behind the ship’s bow, streaking outward. An instant later it, too, evaporated and vanished into the depths of space in a nova’s glare of visible light and hard radiation that silently washed across the hulls of every ship in the Imperial squadron.

“Many of the ships sustained lethal damage at this point,” the admiral’s voice went on, emotionless. “The micro black hole’s explosive evaporation must have been equivalent to the simultaneous detonation of some thousands of nuclear warheads. EMP and radiation damage crippled at least half the ships and inflicted thousands of casualties.

“Admiral Kawashima recognized what was happening, of course, and shut down all external communications links. The rebels were unable to directly influence any more of our shipboard AIs. As a result, they almost immediately changed tactics. Please keep your attention focused on the planet.”

The face of the world, half-full, was changing.

The transformation was so rapid that Kima was not at first sure what he was seeing. At a point not far from the equator, clouds were gathering in a great, spiraling whorl, moving so quickly that even from synchorbit their movement could be seen by the naked eye as a slow, writhing crawl. Under extreme magnification and image enhancement, they took on a distinctly three-dimensional aspect, each tiny thunderhead edged by its own shadow. Where seconds before perhaps half of the planet’s seas and barren stretches of land and ice cap were visible, new clouds were appearing, puffing up out of nothing, crowding together, deepening, quickening, building a hurricane that spanned a quarter of the planet’s visible disk as Kima watched.

At the heart of that eerie, titanic storm, lightnings pulsed and throbbed, like a heartbeat cast in light to make it visible, each silent flicker muffled and diffused by the masking clouds. Near Herakles’s north pole, a thin smear of pale, wavering light just visible against that portion of the polar zone in darkness faded, then winked out almost magically. Data flickered and shifted in the overlaid information displays.

Abruptly,
something
happened… a flicker of motion, a flash of light. Those in the audience could not be sure exactly what, if anything, they’d just seen. New blocks of data wrote themselves across parts of the display, registering events invisible to human senses.

“That first shot missed,” the admiral said. “I’ll have the simulation AI play the next one at a reduced speed. Time factor five to one.”

It happened again, but this time slowly enough that the watchers could perceive a thread of intensely brilliant, blue-white light streaking up from the precise center of that whirlpool of clouds, a point marked by a tiny hole, the storm’s eye. The thread drew itself skyward, razor crisp, laser-beam straight, detaching itself from the planet slowly at first, then spearing into the midst of the Imperial fleet with an apparent acceleration, an illusion created by perspective.

“Time factor one thousand to one.”

The movement slowed again, sharply. The thread became a tiny, fiercely radiating star drifting rapidly upward through empty space, targeted precisely on the heavy cruiser
Zintu,
sister to
Mogami.

The imagery obviously had been captured at the extreme limit of those sensors recording the event, but the resolving power was good enough to record in detail the explosion unfolding like a blossoming flower, a blinding dazzle of actinic violence that briefly outshone the glare of Mu Herculis itself.
Zintu
simply vanished, her enormous, cylindrical bulk converted in an instant into that glare of raw energy… plus a few hurtling scraps of twisted and half-molten debris flung clear by that rapidly expanding wave front. Other ships nearby, a frigate and a small destroyer, were lightly brushed by
Zintu’s
flowering, a caress that boiled away hull metal and armor, turrets and fairings, and left both vessels lifeless, blast-tortured wrecks.

“Kuso,”
someone in the audience said quietly, almost reverently.

“The missile,” the admiral continued as though he’d not heard, “was analyzed spectroscopically. It was nothing more than a block of nanofactured fabricrete and iron massing approximately one metric ton, accelerated to a velocity of over ten percent of the speed of light and glowing partly from the friction of its passage through the Heraklean atmosphere, and partly from the play of incredible energies across its surface. We believe it was part of the outer shell of one of the atmosphere generating units on Herakles’s surface. After traversing the thirty thousand kilometers between the ground and
Zintu
in nine-tenths of one second, it struck the cruiser amidships. We calculate that the transitional kinetic energy liberated by that impact was somewhere between 10
¹⁹
and 10
²⁰
joules, or some one thousand times the yield of a twenty-megaton thermonuclear warhead. It appears, gentlemen, that the rebels have found a dramatic means of overcoming their lack of nuclear weaponry.”

There was an uncomfortable stir among the watchers, and Kima heard the murmur of urgent, low-voiced exchanges among them. The Imperium had long maintained its military superiority over the Shichiju through the simple expedient of being the only one of the Hegemony’s member states permitted through the government’s charter to possess nuclear weapons. There were rumors that the rebels were working on developing such weapons for themselves. With this demonstration at Herakles, perhaps they no longer needed them.

The physics of that demonstration bothered Kima, however.

“The energy required to accelerate a one-ton mass to thirty-some thousand kilometers per second,” Kima pointed out, “must be nothing less than astronomical.…”

“Nothing less,
Shoshosan,”
Miyagi replied, the words dry.

“But where could they get such power? Or… have they found a means of creating a quantum power tap on the planet’s surface?”

“Unlikely,
Shoshosan.
Such installations are extremely large and require enormous technical staffs, assets that we do not believe the rebels possess.” The admiral gave a command, restoring the normal one-to-one time factor of the scene.

Once again, there was a flicker of motion, a flash of light. This time the target was one of the squadron’s outrider ships, a destroyer positioned to intercept fleeing rebel ships some half a million kilometers farther out.

At that distance, the hurtling missile took an agony of time, more than fifteen seconds, to reach the target. The destroyer
Urakaze,
suddenly aware of its danger, engaged its main drives in a desperate attempt to step aside. Unfortunately, the huge ship was moving tail-first toward the planet, having just completed its deceleration from the outer system; it took precious seconds to bring its fusion drives on line, precious seconds more simply to kill the last of its planetward velocity… and whoever was aiming those rocks had clearly anticipated the Imperial warship’s attempt at escape.

The missile struck
Urakaze’s
stern directly between its paired, glowing Venturis, and the destroyer vanished in a silent nova’s flare of light.

“Note the fact,” the admiral continued, “that Herakles’s magnetic field has vanished. The event registered on our sensors, of course, and in the disappearance of the planet’s aurorae. Our scientists are unable to explain the mechanism, though it strongly suggests that the Heraklean Xenophobe is behind the phenomenon. We know Xenophobes make extensive use of magnetic fields. They generate an intense, highly localized field, for example, that actually changes the structure of rock by rearranging its constituent atoms. That’s how they’re able to tunnel through solid rock at relatively high speeds. Presumably, the Heraklean Xenophobe somehow tapped the planetary magnetic field and used the energy to launch those boulders. Since Xenophobes are thermovores, it undoubtedly also directly utilized the heat of the planet’s core, though we had no way of measuring that.”