Netlink (24 page)

With bitter intensity, Ferris hoped that whatever the tech-types had plucked from that building was goking worth it. Some of those men and women had been his friends. And Kara. It would be months before he even knew whether or not she was safe.

He checked his time sense. Liftoff in five more minutes.

Good. He would be goking glad to see the last of this world.

Alerted by coded transmissions from the surface of Kasei, the Confederation warfleet materialized a few hundred thousand kilometers outsystem from the gold and ocher crescent of the planet. They would remain only a few minutes, long enough to pick up the ascraft fleeing Mars and to discourage Imperial pursuit.

Largest by far of the Confederation ships was
Toryu.
Despite her name, she was not one of the Imperial
ryu
carriers, but a Confederation design. Not a dragonship, but a
to-ryu,
a “dragon killer.” An entirely new type of warship, she was properly classified as a magnetic gun vessel, though it was better known throughout the fleet as a magun.

Roughly spherical in shape and with a diameter of nearly two kilometers, the magun was essentially a million-ton Naga fragment wrapped around a small asteroid. Drawing power from a quantum power tap, the Naga created and manipulated intense magnetic fields designed to hurl five- or ten-kilogram chunks of nickel-iron in any desired direction at high speed. While it couldn’t match the one-ton throw weights of a planetary Naga, it could accelerate smaller pieces to velocities approaching ten percent of light. Even one kilogram at that speed liberated energies enough to vaporize a city; when they hit a starship, even one as large as a ryu carrier, much of the ship simply vaporized, while the rest was reduced to tumbling, scattering wreckage.

The exchange with the Imperials was mercifully brief. A hastily assembled squadron, including the carrier
Funryu,
the
Raging Dragon,
accelerated outsystem from the Aresynch naval yards, in close pursuit of a small vessel struggling to free itself from Kasei’s gravity well. From half a million kilometers further out,
Toryu’s
magnetic fields became nearly as powerful, for a brief instant, as those of a spinning neutron star. The projectile launched from her dark surface was too small and too fast to be seen directly, though
Funryu
sensed the projectile coming. The ryu-carrier had opened fire, but its point-defense weapons were designed to handle slow-moving objects, like missiles, and the incoming lump of metal crossed the final hundred kilometers in three hundredths of a second. The ryu’s AI was fast enough to target the projectile, but the weapons servos were not. Ten kilograms of nickel-iron struck the
Funryu
on her upper deck just forward of her main superstructure tower, liberating the energy equivalent to a small atomic bomb.

The prow of the kilometer-long ship vanished in starcore heat, along with most of her forward weapons systems, her crew’s quarters, and her primary fire control. Her bridge, buried deep within the huge vessel’s core beneath dense wrappings of duralloy, was safe, but the rest of the vessel was reduced to whirling, disintegrating scrap in the blink of an eye.

The other Imperial vessels broke off after that and kept a respectful distance, obviously and with good reason reluctant to tangle with the Confederation fleet.

The destroyer
Constitution
retrieved the ascraft minutes later. Together then, as though guided by a single, master choreographer, the ships of the Confederation battlegroup flashed past Mars, cutting past on the dayside opposite the sky-el to avoid the planetary defense system and using the small world’s gravity to sling them into a new course. Accelerating hard, they drove for the outer system.

Then they shifted into K-T space, mission complete.

Nearly thirty minutes later, the string of data transmitted by Kara from Aresynch was intercepted by the
Surprise,
a two-thousand-ton scout craft adrift just above the plane of Saturn’s rings. The vehicle’s powered-down orbit had been calculated to place it on the sunward side of the gas giant eighty minutes after the beginning of the operation and to maintain a clear line of sight to distant Mars throughout the mission’s critical period. Minutes later, a general alert arrived, warning all vessels in Solar space that enemy forces, believed to be Confederation raiders, were attacking Kasei. The alert was upgraded to a System Emergency when the Confederation ships arrived.

After verifying the transmission codes and assuring himself that this was, indeed, the expected payoff from Operation Sandstorm, the scout’s captain… waited. Near-Saturn space was scarcely crowded, but there were ships enough about—remote prospectors, military sentinels, the research colony on Titan—that he didn’t want to call attention to himself by suddenly switching on his quantum power tap and accelerating for a K-T jump just moments after word of a Confederation attack had been received by the vessels and bases in near-Saturn space.

Nearly a full standard day later, with military traffic heavy in Kasei space but all but nonexistent in the vicinity of Saturn,
Surprise
powered up and nudged herself clear of the gas giant, accelerating slowly but steadily for open space. Her IFFs identified her as a privately operated comet miner. Despite the alerts and the war scare, there were far too many vessels moving in and out of Solar space to impose any kind of quarantine or search blockade, a fact that Sandstorm’s planners had been counting on. Unchallenged, the
Surprise
accelerated to relativistic speeds well beyond the orbit of Neptune, then vanished into K-T space. Though the battlefleet would be carrying back the same stolen data that
Surprise
held in her memory banks, the scout was nearly twice as fast in the K-T translation as the battlefleet.

That meant the
Surprise
would arrive at New America a good twenty standards before the Confederation battlegroup, and over a full month before Kara Hagan and the men who’d penetrated the Aresynchorbital.

Colonel Masato Watanabe sat slumped behind his desk, watching the pale, motionless sculpture of light that hung above the holo projector there. The image showed a young woman, nude, completely unadorned with makeup, jewelry, or hardware, her facial expression neutral, almost blank. She was clearly occidental, however, with light-colored eyes and hair the color of young wheat.

Major Yasunari Iwata gestured at the image. “But surely, Colonel—”

“It doesn’t help us, Major.”

“The DNA analysis is quite explicit, sir. This should give our agents everything they need to find the person who broke into the Net.”

Watanabe sighed. Imperial technicians had carefully vacuumed the interior of the comm module scant minutes after the invaders had shot their way out of the area. Though the couch contained minute particles of skin from literally hundreds of recent users, it was possible to match the bits of recovered DNA and make a determination of which phenotype was represented by the most fragments. Since each successive person to enter the module and strap him or herself to the couch tended to obliterate or wipe away the majority of the cells left by previous occupants, it was a near statistical certainty that the phenotype expression represented by the most recovered DNA fragments was that of the last person to lie there. Some of those fragments, drawn from still-living cells, had enabled a powerful medical AI computer to construct this holographic image, an accurate recreation of the person’s normal appearance. Age was a guess, of course, but the likelihood was that the enemy agents would have been young, between twenty and forty, say, and the computer could give a range of facial types based on likely aging modalities.

“You forget, Major, the fact that this person will be in disguise. She will have, quite literally, a new face, even new fingerprints and retinal patterns, if need be.” He scowled with distaste. “The Frontier barbarians think nothing of rearranging their bodies through the agency of a Naga parasite.”

Iwata looked chastened. “Of course, Colonel. You are right.”

Watanabe smiled. “You know, Major, there is among the Westerners an old and racist joke to the effect that they cannot tell us apart.”

“No, sir. I didn’t know.”

“Well, there is. But this time, at least, it was we who could not tell them apart from us.”

Iwata looked puzzled. “Colonel, I do not understand.”

“Never mind. Did you learn anything from the body we recovered?”

“Very little, Colonel-san. We attempted to link with the parasite inhabiting the corpse, but it appears the creatures begin losing their internal cohesion shortly after their host’s death. We’d hoped to read the man’s memories at least, but—” He shrugged. “The technique is still in its infancy.”

“Understood. I wish we could have captured one of them.”

“I am most sorry, honored Colonel.”

“No, Iwata. The responsibility, the
fault
was mine.”

“The watch officer monitoring the Net during the incursion—”

“Lieutenant Ishimoto. It was not his fault either. It is easy to forget how vast the cyberspace of the Net truly is. We are lucky he got close enough to determine where the agent was operating from and to stop her, possibly, from doing even more serious damage to the network.” He nodded at the nude figure on his desk. She really was quite beautiful, for an Occidental, of course. “You may conduct your search, but I fear it will be useless.”

“Perhaps, though,” Iwata said slowly, “this will help us in the future. If we can identify this person…”

“I never cared much for vengeance, Major.”

“I wasn’t thinking of vengeance, sir. I was thinking of knowledge. She must know much about the CMI, about the Confederation’s plans, about… who knows? If our people could locate her, even on New America or wherever she came from, we could have another chance. We should try to take her for interrogation.”

“Perhaps we will, Major. Perhaps we will. I will certainly suggest the possibility in my report to the TJK. In the meantime, however, we must see what is to be done about containing the damage this woman and her friends have caused. And… we should prepare our reports for the Emperor’s Staff.”

“The… the Emperor, sir?”

“Of course. You know, don’t you, that this raid must lead us to war.”

Iwata gaped for a moment before recovering his composure. “War…”

“Of course.Exactly as we’d hoped.”

That surprised Iwata even more. “This… was desired?
Planned!”

“Yes, Major. From the beginning. We didn’t know what form the provocation would take, nor did we anticipate that they would learn of the
o-denwa.
But the Imperial Staff has been looking for an excuse to move against the frontier provinces again, to bring them back into the Imperial fold.

“And these raiders today have given us all the excuse we could possibly need to declare all-out war on the Confederation.”

Chapter 16

John von Neumann, best known, perhaps, as one of the great pioneers of computer technology, made a significant contribution to biological theory in the mid-twentieth century: metabolism and replication in any system, though seemingly inextricably linked, are in fact logically separable. It is possible to imagine organisms that are nothing but hardware, capable of metabolism without replication. It is also possible to imagine organisms that are pure software, replicating themselves without carrying out their own metabolic processes.

Such organisms, perforce, would have a purely parasitical existence, depending on the metabolic processes of host hardware for survival.

—
Biology and Computers

D
R
. I
AN
M
C
M
ILLEN

C
.
E
. 2015

Dr. Daren Cameron regarded the Commune with something approaching a dark and malevolent fury. For the second time in his life, now, he’d encountered a Commune pseudopod that had reacted to his presence, the thousands of individual members interlinking themselves in a tightly packed and ordered mass, then heaving themselves erect, creating a shimmering, iridescent pillar about two meters tall. Sunlight winked and glinted from the myriad bodies, which were trembling slightly, probably with the sheer effort required to maintain its upright position.

Damn it, he and Taki should be on Dante in
fact
, not in this illusory simulated reality. The creature confronting him was being animated by a powerful AI that had access to everything known about the Dantean Communes… everything
known.
No matter how detailed and subtle the simulation might be, there was no way to learn anything new from this illusion.

“Gok!” he said, his shoulders slumping. “This is useless! Worthless make-work!”

“Daren?” Taki’s voice called over his Companion’s communication circuit, her voice sounding inside his head. “Daren? What is it?”

“There is no way we can learn anything new here!” He paused, then shouted it louder, directing it at the AI monitoring the sim. “You hear up there? There’s no way to learn anything
new!”

“That’s not entirely true, Dar,” Taki replied. “Chaos, remember…?”

He scowled at the Commune pillar, still balanced there a few meters away as though trying to say something… to ask directions, possibly, to the nearest Commune tower. Taki was right, of course, though that didn’t help the way he was feeling. The idea of researching in simulation was not completely invalid, no matter how futile it might seem at the moment, because of the sheer complexity of the set of data being observed. Chaos theory—which among other things worked with large-scale results derived from small-scale variations in an unstable or extremely complex system—almost guaranteed that each encounter with the Commune in this ViReality would be unique, and as filled with the promise of some new revelation as an actual encounter on Dante would be. In a sense, it was like doing repeated computer simulations to test a theory or a set of engineering calculations, a time-hallowed concept that had been one of the earliest applications of computers, six centuries before.