Netlink (40 page)

That was why the larger ships in the Combined Fleet all carried squadrons of warflyers or were covered by squadrons off the ryu carriers. Kara slowed above a particularly large mass of crawling, oozing gray eating its way into the
Gauss
and opened fire with her laser. She experimented with the beam intensity as she swept it over the ship’s hull; she needed to find a setting that would cook the Web units without punching a hole through the science ship’s hull. One hundred to one hundred fifty megawatts seemed to be about right. Each burst seared the duralloy armor, scorching paint and peeling off external nano layers, but so long as she kept the beam moving it could not heat any one point enough to burn through.

The Web nano-D, however, designed to receive power from lower-powered lasers, could only handle that influx of energy for a few seconds before it began to curdle and boil. A few seconds more, and the stuff exploded into vapor, all cohesion between its molecule-sized working parts lost.

It was like bailing an ocean with a teacup, however. As fast as Kara burned the snowdrifts into vapor, more of the infalling nanotechnic weapons landed. Some were collecting on her warflyer as she worked, and twice she had to call for help from someone else in the squadron to burn them off before they ate through to some vital piece of
Kara’s Matic’s
internal structure.

At least they were slowing the destruction of the
Gauss.

A little. She hoped.…

Dev rode the Net, watching the battle with a curiously detached, almost casual lack of emotion. The Web vehicles appeared to be concentrating their heaviest firepower on the largest Combined Fleet ships.
Hiryu,
slightly ahead of the dome-shaped formation of Imperial carriers, had almost immediately become the focus for a barrage of dozens of energy beams.

One of the big Web Alphas had maneuvered to within a scant thousand kilometers of the
Hiryu.
Something like an enormous circular hatchway irised open on the hemisphere facing the Imperial carrier, revealing a blue-glowing cavern within. A moment later, and the cavern lit up with a dazzling blue-white glare, the energy spilling over into the ultraviolet wavelengths.

Dev recognized the energy signature of a positron beam, similar, if vastly smaller in scale, to the antimatter electron beam he’d seen jetting from the Great Annihilator at the Galactic Core. Flaring brilliantly as it plowed through the mist of particles and debris adrift in its path, it slashed like a sun-bright razor through the
Hiryu’s
heavily armored flank. The beam burned for only a second or so before snapping off;
Hiryu
staggered under the searing caress, slewing to port as a hundred-meter gash in her side spewed dense clouds of atmosphere and liquid, freezing into a silver mist as it hit the vacuum of space.

Donryu
took the next burst, the blue-white beam of annihilation sweeping across the kilometer-long vessel’s upper works, detonating weapons turrets and shearing off antenna arrays in a cascade of golden explosions. The heavy cruiser
Ashigara
changed course, accelerating hard on flaring plasma drives, sliding between the stricken
Donryu
and the relentless fire of the Web moonlet. Blue fire raked the
Ashigara
from stem to stern, ripping open hull plates and slicing through her slush hydrogen tanks. Liquid hydrogen sprayed into space, glittering like a cloud of ice crystals as the cloud expanded.
Ashigara
shuddered, then exploded amidships as her fusion plant’s magnetics failed and the temperatures and pressures of a star’s core were vented against the relatively frail and unresisting latticework of duralloy plate, diacarb weave, and nan-aluminum surrounding it. A nova’s light briefly glared alongside the crippled
Donryu,
reflecting from the larger vessel’s hull like a sunset shimmering off the surface of an iced-over lake. Part of the
Ashigara’s
bridge structure, half molten and tumbling end over end, slammed into the
Donryu’s
forward quarter to starboard, plunging through decks and compartments like a hurled rock slamming through meticulously stacked and ordered crockery.

The Combined Fleet was striking back with every weapon at its command. Three of the Confederation maguns advanced through the storm of machines, slamming round after high-speed round into the Alphas. Each projectile struck home with a release of kinetic energy equivalent to megatons of TNT, and in a few moments, the sides of the Web Alphas facing the Combined Fleet were beginning to glow in a patchwork of orange and yellow craters, half of their surface turned molten by the barrage. So effective was the attack that the Web faltered in the steady concentration of fire against the ryu carriers, scattering, then shifting, coming to bear on the three magnetic gun vessels. The
Naga Reliant
was their first target, and after only a few moments of high-energy barrage, the gun vessel began to dissolve as the Naga enfolding the asteroid that was the vessel’s heart fragmented and died. The gun vessels carried only a relatively small human crew; the
Naga Reliant’
s bridge superstructure was burned away by an antimatter beam in the first second or two of the exchange. With no human controlling it, giving it orders, the vessel’s Naga continued trying to fulfill the last instructions it had been given, moving closer and yet closer to its tormentor, hurling swarms of rocks at relativistic speeds, smashing at the Alpha, smashing and smashing until its own cohesion gave way first and the magun gun vessel exploded in a thin haze of white-hot debris.

Naga Repulse
died next, valiantly attempting to protect the Imperial heavy cruiser
Chikuma.
The antimatter particle beam sliced through the Naga and the asteroid within like a white-hot wire through plastic, emitting a vast, obscuring cloud of vaporized nickel iron and hurtling droplets of molten rock. Seconds after the magun’s destruction, the
Chikuma
exploded with the force of many thermonuclear warheads, the detonation briefly outshining the two dwarf suns nearby.

The battle had been under way for an eternity—all of six or seven seconds. Though Dev was not actively counting, a part of his mind was aware of the fact that twenty-three DalRiss cityships had been savaged already by the Web, and as the surviving cityships scattered under the onslaught, the fire swung to concentrate on the human vessels.

The volume of human fire returned against the Web was stupendous, devastating in its sheer volume and fire.

But it wasn’t enough, not by many orders of magnitude. No one could have predicted such a large number of enemy machines and craft in this one volume of space. All of the human warships in creation could not hope to stand for long against that horde.

The human-DalRiss fleet was losing the battle as Dev watched.

Before long, Kara found herself maneuvering through a literal storm of bits and pieces of debris that clinked and banged and thumped along her Cutlass’s hull, a clattering hail sweeping across a metal roof. The space junk ranged in size from grains of sand and dust motes to larger, mostly unidentifiable fragments. Lasers and particle beams, normally invisible in the vacuum of space, were becoming visible as ghostly flickers and pulses of translucent light as they shone through the thickening cloud of debris.

“Phantom One-one! Phantom One-one!” she heard over the tactical channel. “This is One-five! I’m in trouble!”

“One-five, this is One!” she called back. “Where are you?”

Coordinates giving her the other Cutlass’s position relative to her own flickered across her visual display. “I got hit by something,” the voice said. “My drive’s out!”

“Looks like I’m closest,” she said. “Hold tight. I’m coming!”

One-five was Phil Dolan, one of the men who’d accompanied her to Kasei. Her warflyer’s AI had the other Cutlass centered now between flashing green brackets. He was only a hundred meters away, drifting across the blasted and surreal landscape of the
Gauss’s
upper deck. Calculating burn times and vectors with practiced ease, Kara boosted across the intervening space, flipping over halfway there and decelerating in toward the helplessly drifting flyer. Righting herself, she deployed her primary arm, a telescoping, jointed branch of duralloy that unfolded from a recess in
Kara’s Matic’s
hull and opened into a clawed, grasping metal hand.

She was almost there.…

Something struck Dolan’s Cutlass; she didn’t see what it was, but it was large, larger than the warflyer. It might have been a fragment of one of the human ships hurtling through space at high speed, but judging by its vector, she thought it more likely that it was one of the Web constructs. Whatever its origin, it hurtled in from Kara’s right, sheared into Dolan’s flyer, and the two exploded in a blinding flash of unbottled fusion energy. At virtually the same instant, something—a fragment of wreckage propelled by the blast—struck
Kara’s Matic
like a sledgehammer blow, shredding her drive module in a spray of glittering fragments and sparkling droplets of slush hydrogen reaction mass.

The long, dark, and convoluted mass of the
Carl Friedrich
Gauss
swept past her blurred vision… and again… and again…

And still again, growing visibly smaller now. Stunned by the impact, Kara was unable for a moment to realize that her Cutlass, what was left of it, was tumbling end over end, falling away from the
Gauss
at a considerable velocity imparted by the hurtling debris.

And with her plasma drive and reaction mass stores both gone, she wouldn’t have a chance in hell of ever arresting her spin and making it back again.

Chapter 26

North American or Ukrainian or Chinese from New America.Europeans from Loki. Japanese from Earth. Juanyekundan. Shivan. Cuchulainnan. What does anything having to do with language or religion or skin color or eye shape have to do with humanity? We have more in common with each other than we do with anything from Out There.

—
Remembrance

T
RAVIS
E
WELL
S
INCLAIR

C
.
E
. 2561

Dev watched with a feeling of icy detachment, less aware of the countless thousands of personal and individual tragedies occurring second by second throughout the Combined Fleet than he was of the single, monolithic reality that the human-DalRiss fleet was being crushed, wiped from the sky like a cloud of dancing gnats caught in the flame of a blowtorch. They had already destroyed tens of thousands of Web combat machines—
hundreds
of thousands if the tiny light-sail craft scorched by lasers or vaporized in sweeps of laser light or particle beams were counted—yet they’d scarcely touched the body of the enemy force.

Despair.

He could sense it through the Net, rising from the minds of every human jacked into the Fleet’s communications net, then picked up and echoed across the I2C linkage to the Shichiju and back.

How many minds were jacked in at that moment? Dev didn’t know, and there was no software available on-line to give him an answer. But he could feel the building emotion, a black cloud dragging at his thoughts.

He could also feel the Net’s strength, an expression of its will, its scope, the depth of its analytical and computational power gathering,
building,
reaching up and out across the I2C.…

Vic was linked into the command center aboard the Confederation carrier
Karyu.
Reports continued to flood though his consciousness, reports of ships lost, of men and women lost, of incalculable numbers of enemy craft descending on his dwindling command like a whirling, deadly blizzard.

He felt close to crying with frustration. The carefully ordered plans, the meticulously reasoned logic, the convincing rationalization that with faster-than-light communications and the almost-certain guess that the Alphas were a vulnerable command target, all were coming crashing down in ruin after only a few seconds of the most bloody and savage combat that he had ever witnessed.

But ships, his ships, his people were dying at a terrifying and relentless pace. Such slaughter served no purpose; as far as he could tell from his vantage point aboard the
Karyu,
the Web horde was relatively untouched. It was like trying to kill a DalRiss cityship creature by slicing off a few cells from the tip of one arm at a time.

“Resistance is heavier than expected,” he said, speaking to Admiral Tanaka over the command link. “The enemy’s numbers are far greater than expected. The Confederation contingent has already taken heavy casualties. I suggest that we break off the action if we can, and regroup at Rally One.”

“You are right about the resistance,
Shoshosan,”
Tanaka replied. “But breaking off may be difficult at this point, and rendezvous and recovery with the DalRiss will not be possible.”

“We’ll have to E and E then in K-T space. The DalRiss will have to jump out on their own and wait for us.”

“Affirmative. I will pass the order.”

“Give us time to recover the warflyers.”

“Order their recovery at once. I want to begin boosting clear of this slaughterhouse as soon as possible!”

That wouldn’t be time enough, not to get them all. Vic was achingly aware that Kara was out there somewhere. If the
Carl Friedrich Gauss
dropped into K-T space before she was able to recover the squadrons of flyers covering her, Kara and the other Phantoms would never make it out. They were strictly short-range fighters, incapable of entering K-T space.

But if they had to straggle behind to get the last few flyers aboard, so be it. “We’ll do our best.”

Swiftly, he broke the connection, then began rattling off new orders to the ships in the Confederation contingent.

Taki saw the warflyer tumbling clear of the
Gauss,
pin-wheeling into darkness, strewing an expanding spiral of glittering wreckage as it fell. Instantly, she oriented her metal and plastic body, targeted the tumbling object with her probe’s sensors and locked on. Exercising her will, she fired the probe’s aft thrusters.