Jackers (31 page)

“How about deep space scans?” Dev asked. “Communications, that sort of thing?”

“No scans. The synchorbital’s sensors weren’t equipped to handle a spin like that, though we might be able to cobble something together after a while. I have most of my engineering people at work now setting up grav detectors. Communications are no problem.”

“And your planet-side base?”

Curtis pointed to a cluster of survival domes among the rocks and crags farther up the mountain slope. “That’s it. Dome sweet dome. We’re keeping things small… again until we know whether or not the Xeno’s going to try to eat us. We’re getting all we need from the sky-el, actually. There’s still quite a bit of food up there—mostly stabilized nanoform—so we have plenty to eat. And the nano programmers are working. We’ll be able to grow most of what we need.”

“We’ll have to keep using the synchorbital as our space station,” Sinclair pointed out. “At least until we can arrange for something better. And I suggest we get people to working on the orbital lasers right away. We’re going to need them, sooner or later.”

“How long do you think we have, General?” Petruccio wanted to know.

“I wish I could tell you that, Commander. I really do. It depends on how bright our friend Kawashima is… and while I was on New America, he struck me as very bright indeed.

“We have one advantage working for us,” Sinclair continued. “If we can get our orbital detectors set up and working, we’ll have advance warning if the Imperials arrive. With a star as massive as Mu Herculis A, they won’t be dropping into fourspace closer than a couple of astronomical units. As at New America, we’ll have plenty of time to reboard our ships and haul Gs for deep space.”

A starship’s drive drew energy from K-T space by utilizing large quantities of energy from the ship’s fusion plant and converting it to mass in the time-honored give-and-take equivalency of
E=mc
²
.
That mass manifested itself as twin microsingularities, a pair of neutron-sized black holes circling one another in mutual and precisely tuned harmonic resonance. That resonance served as a kind of dual gateway, a channel for the incredible energies freely available beyond the K-T barrier, and a hyperdimensional path for the starship itself as it plunged into the faster-than-light realm of the godsea.

The microsingularities, of course, generated intense gravitational fields, though these were so tiny that their effects were not felt more than a very few meters beyond the drive containment fields. By the same token, however, the precisely tuned balance between the two singularities was extremely sensitive to the curvature of local space. Summoning those twin, captive demons too deeply with the gravity well of world or sun invited disaster. The energy channeling through from the godsea might be closed off as the black holes evaporated, but it was also possible for the energy flow to cascade wildly, generating an unstoppable avalanche of power.

“And the Naga?” Dev asked. “Have you seen anything of it?”

“In two months,” Petruccio said with a shrug, “there hasn’t been one damned sign of the Xenos. Not a planetary Naga. Not a traveler. Not a combat module. Not a wisp of nano-D or a positive DSA. Nothing. It’s as though they got tired of waiting and left.”

Dev glanced at the CO of the
Vindemiatrix.
She was a tall woman, with a shipjacker’s brush-cut hair and a full, almost stocky figure beneath her freshly nano-grown fatigues. “Oh, it’s still here,” Dev said. “You can be sure of that.”

“Unless Morgan’s people killed it with their bomb,” Curtis said.

“Unlikely,” Katya put in, “given how big a planetary Naga is.” She looked around, wonder alight in her eyes. “Is this really the site of Morgan’s Hold?”

“That it is,” Curtis told her. “It’s listed as Mount Athos on the charts and navsims.” He pointed. “We even found some of the 62nd’s old equipment over there. Rusted-out combat rifles, armor, field gear, that sort of thing.” He laughed. “No warstriders, of course.”

The others laughed as well. That was part of the legend of Morgan’s Hold, that infantry had fought Xenos when the warstriders had abandoned them. There
were
warstriders in the indicated direction, a Manta, a Fastrider, and a couple of Ghostriders, but those were manned and operative, standing guard over the makeshift landing area. The field area was busy, as ground personnel unloaded the newly grounded aerospace craft.

“And off that way,” Curtis continued, “that’s the Augean Peninsula, or where it was, anyway. As you can see, it’s mostly underwater now.”

Dev turned on the hilltop, taking his bearings. That stretch of sundance-glittering ocean was where Argos had stood. Once, the vertical tower of the sky-el must have gleamed golden in the sun right
there.
And the Xenos, when they came, would have swarmed up the slope from
that
direction, from the north.…

Every ground trooper and striderjack in the Shichiju knew the story of Morgan’s Hold. The story had already gone down in legend with other hopeless last stands, with the Alamo, Roarke’s Drift, and Kavalerovo. Garrisoned by one Imperial Marine battalion and two companies of the 62nd Hegemony Infantry—troops dispatched more to keep the peace among the panicky civilians than to attempt to protect them from the still mysterious threat—the planet had been virtually defenseless.

It had become more defenseless still when the Imperial troops, commanded by one Colonel Nagai, had decided to withdraw in the face of swarming hordes of Xeno snakes. He’d ordered Captain David Morgan of the 62nd to withdraw as well, but Morgan and 387 volunteers—most of the strength of his force—had refused. Argos had a civilian population of nearly eight hundred thousand, and that number had nearly doubled over the past weeks as outlying settlements had been overrun by the insatiable hordes of snakelike, deadly Xenophobes. His Hegemon infantry was all that stood between the advancing Xenos and the Argos Sky-el.

Chance and geography had favored the defense. Xenophobes, for reasons unknown, avoided seawater, and Argos was located on an equatorial peninsula jutting southwest into the Alcmenan Sea. Astride the narrow isthmus northward was Mount Athos, at thirteen hundred meters one of Herakles’s more mediocre peaks, but ideally positioned for defending the single land approach to the capital.

The troops had held Mount Athos through wave after wave of Xenophobe assault, fighting them with hand weapons, with semiportable lasers and cannons dismounted from vehicles, with jury-rigged bombs and crudely programmed nano-D. They’d held out for nearly two weeks, during which time most of the planet’s civilian population escaped up the sky-el to the gathering fleet of transports mustered there from across the Shichiju. The severely wounded in Morgan’s band were evacuated with the civilians; the lightly wounded hung on, scavenging the battlefield for ammunition and partially charged laser power packs. In the end, sixteen unwounded members of the unit abandoned their positions on Mount Athos and escaped up the sky-el. Numerous Xenos had already broken past Mount Athos or tunneled up inside the city from below and were beginning to digest the city’s structures, but Morgan’s men had staved off the inevitable collapse long enough for the evacuation to be completed.

David Morgan himself had not lived to see the victory. On the third day he’d tried to drag a fallen comrade from beneath an advancing Xenophobe Mamba, been hit himself, and been crushed to death.

The stand, called Morgan’s Hold, had been enshrined in song and story and ViRdrama throughout the Frontier, despite the Empire’s efforts to suppress it. Nagai’s abrupt decision to evacuate did not reflect well on Imperial honor and martial prowess when contrasted with the determination of the Heglegger troops, and more than one Hegemony soldier had been cashiered or worse for singing “The Ballad of Morgan’s Hold,” or even for having the words and music downloaded into his personal RAM. The song had become something of a cry of defiance by Frontier rebels against the Imperial tyranny.

Song and legend, too, remained part of the ongoing rivalry between foot soldiers and warstriders; Nagai’s marines had been elite striderjacks, and their combat machines had been top-of-the-line Daimyos and Samurais. Reportedly, not one warstrider had been lost in the defense of Argos, and at the time it had been widely reported that leg infantry—leggers—simply could not stand up to Xeno snakes.

Morgan’s people had given the lie to
that
idea.

The very shape of the planet’s geography had been altered by the aftermath of the battle. One hour after the last human had left Herakles, a five-hundred-megaton bomb provided by Nagai’s marines had been detonated in the sky-el, just above Argos. The fireball had eradicated the city and scooped out a vast, shallow crater into which the sea had poured, an avenging, white-foam flood. Thundering, rising clouds of steam had blotted out half the hemisphere for months afterward. From space, the Augean Peninsula now looked as though a gigantic bite had been taken out of it, and the new, inland sea created by the city’s immolation was still radioactive.

Dev shivered, the reaction partly due to the thought of Argos’s destruction, but partly too from the cold. He palmed the control patch of his bodysuit and wished up its internal heat.

He was thinking about the huge, pyramidal atmosphere nanoconverters… one of which Dev could see from here, a smooth-sided, triangular mountain against the northern horizon. The air tasted hard and thin, with a metallic bite to it. The oxygen percentage stood now at about twelve percent, with a partial pressure of .108 atm., low, but breathable. The Heraklean terraforming project had not been entirely complete when the Xenos had appeared, and the atmosphere generators had been shut down twenty-eight years before.

By making the air breathable, those artificial mountains had also rendered the climate cooler. Temperatures had been dropping steadily on Herakles for two centuries and might drop farther still if the converters weren’t soon brought back on-line. If the Xeno hadn’t destroyed them—and apparently it hadn’t—they would one day make the world’s air thicker and warmer as well.

“So where is the local Xeno?” Petruccio asked, shaking Dev from his thoughts. “We keep expecting to see him any day.”

Dev looked around. The landscape in every direction was barren—the rock seared naked where the white flame that had destroyed Argos had lightly brushed across it. In the distance, though, Dev thought he could make out flecks of green and the gray and brown of endless rock.

“Underground, certainly,” he said.

“And that’s where we’ll have to go to find it,” Sinclair added. “We’ll have survey teams out looking for cavern entrances or old snake pits as soon as we can organize them. Then we bring Fred down and let him earn his passage.”

“Actually,” Dev said, “I wonder if that’ll be necessary. Looking for holes, I mean.” He was staring once again at the triangular regularity of the atmosphere nanogenerator looming above the northern horizon. “If the Naga here is playing true to form, there’s another way to reach him. A faster way.”

He began describing his idea to the others.

Chapter 21

We see, of course, not with our eyes, but with our brain
—
same for hearing, touch, smell, and taste
—
and our conversations with others are carried out entirely inside our heads. External physical sensation is gathered by the visual, auditory, tactile, or other sensory nerves, and not until it is relayed to the brain is it interpreted as light and dark, as hard or soft, as lover’s face or clenched fist, as smell of genegineered froses or taste of vinegar. Indeed, we live out our lives in magnificent isolation, a universe within our skulls, with but the slenderest and most deceivable of feeds bringing us fresh data about the outside world.

—
The Rise of Technic Man

Fujiwara Naramoro

C.E.
2535

They stood on the mountaintop beneath a sky gone black, vast and thick-strewn with diamond stars. Dev had asked Katya after a communal dinner in the main hab dome whether she would like to take a walk.

Dev knew that something had been troubling Katya since before their precipitous departure from New America, and he was pretty sure he knew what it was. Still, throughout the long passage between the stars, they’d had no chance to discuss it.
Eagle
had been crowded with passengers for which she’d not been equipped. He’d wanted to share some linked downtime with Katya, just to talk, but feared the suggestion would be taken as an invitation to ViRsex and nothing more. Strangely, he found himself shy around Katya now… but her evident distress made him want to reach out and lake her in his arms.

Her willingness to walk with him delighted, as the night of this world entranced. Westward, zodiacal light mounted toward heaven, a diffuse and pale gold pillar just bright enough to banish the dimmest stars. Thirty light-years from Sol, the constellations were already strange, though northward the familiar hourglass of Orion was visible, only slightly distorted and with a distance-dimmed Sirius now shifted by perspective closer to far Rigel. Sol lay in that direction, Dev knew, but was lost here below the horizon.

Bright in the night was Zeta Herculis, a golden spark to the southwest. A subgiant like Mu Herc, six times more luminous than vanished Sol, Zeta was less than nine lights distant and nearly as brilliant here as was Sirius from Earth.

Between east and zenith, a gold thread stretched taut among the stars. Herakles’s space elevator, cast adrift among so many stars, looked like a straight-line scratch against ebon black and was so large and so far that its orbital motion, like a natural satellite’s, could not be distinguished by the naked eye. Clustered at its hub were swarming yet motionless stars, sunlight reflections from the ships of the tiny Confederation fleet.

Among the largest and grandest of all man’s technological works, the broken sky-el seemed nearly lost among so much immensity.

“It’s so vast,” Katya said, awe behind the words as she stared into the heavens. “I don’t know how the Naga can comprehend such emptiness, how they can
endure
it, it’s so different from what they know.”