Symbionts Read Free

lose the corvette if we have to,” Dev told her. “I want that freighter.”
    “We have a long-range visual from Remote Five,” Lieutenant Grier reported. “Confirm the escort is Chitose-class, INS Teshio. And I’m picking up radar originating from New America. They’ll see us in another thirty seconds.”
    That was how long it would take those radar signals—or the call for help that was certainly flashing toward the planet from both targets—to reach New America across nine million kilometers.
    Downloading a command code from his personal RAM, Dev opened a new window-world in his linked awareness. He was still in Eagle’s CDC but looking into night blackness strewn with stars. Brightest was the primary, 26 Draconis A, a yellow sun slightly brighter and hotter than Sol; Draco B, a red dwarf, glowed like a sullen ember in the distance, while the dim and distant third member of the trinary system was invisible from this angle. Centered in the window, the fourth planet in A’s five-world retinue was a gleaming spark with a tiny companion: New America and its moon, Columbia. The Imperial ships were invisible at this distance, of course, marked on the display by a blinking red square encompassing both world and moon and indicating unidentified but presumed hostile fleet elements.
    Almost directly between New America and the Eagle, the images of the two ships the rebels were pursuing had been captured by one of the remote, high-speed probes launched minutes ago. They appeared toy-sized, their edges white-lit in the glare of 26 Draco A. Course and speed data glowing alongside each showed that the corvette was indeed slowing, blocking Eagle’s approach while allowing its larger consort to continue falling toward the planet.
    A suicide’s choice. A Chitose corvette massed nine hundred tons to Eagle’s eighty-four thousand. One salvo from Eagle’s forward laser batteries would leave the escort a riddled, airless hulk.
    “We should smash the goking bastards.”
    Dev wasn’t sure who’d muttered those words over the command link. He could have checked with Eagle’s AI, but it didn’t really matter. “Steady there,” he said. “Our target is the freighter. If we stop to play with that corvette, we’ll be doing exactly what they want.”
    Downloading another command, Dev returned to the CDC. He could feel the tension building among the officers in the linkage, in the clipped exchanges, in the lack of the usual bridgelink banter. That was to be expected. Many of the officers and crew members aboard Eagle, including both Grier and Messier, were New Americans. It must be especially hard for them, Dev thought, to be operating within sight of their homeworld, unable to do a thing about the Imperial battlefleet holding it captive.
    Well, the war had been hard on everyone, and they all knew things were going to get worse before they got better. It was a bitterly unbalanced struggle. The Shichiju —“The Seventy,” a term that had been out of date for some time, now—numbered seventy-eight populated worlds in the seventy-two star systems governed by the Terran Hegemony, the nominal government which in turn was anchored in place by the military might of Dai Nihon, the empire of Greater Japan. So far, just eleven of those worlds had declared their independence by signing the Confederation’s Declaration of Reason, and of those, two of the most important, Eridu and New America, had promptly been occupied by Imperial forces.
    Until just a few months ago, New America had been the capital of the rebel Confederation, the spiritual rallying point for all of the systems that had so far broken with Hegemony and Empire. Almost fifty light years from Sol, New America was one of the richest of the Shichiju’s worlds, with no fewer than three separate colonies—North American, Cantonese, and Ukrainian—and one of the precious few planets discovered so far with a native ecology where men could live without having to terraform