The Risen Empire Read Free Page B

Oczar's viewpoint as his ship went down. By the time the craft had gone silent, its transmitter array ripped out, an even dozen of the protozoan-sized interceptors clung to it. A dozen more had been taken out by the flurry of counterdrones Oczar had launched. This new breed of Rix interceptor seemed unusually aggressive, crowding their prey like a hungry pack of dogs. The kill had been brutal. But the enemy's singlemindedness had justified Oczar's sacrifice. With the interceptors swarming him, the rest of the squadron should be past trouble by now.
    Marx briefly considered assigning Oczar to one of the remaining ships in the squadron. An advantage of remote control was that pilots could switch craft in midmission, and Oczar was a good flyer. But the large wing of backup Intelligencers, flown a safe distance behind by AI, would need a competent human in command to get a decent percentage of them through the interceptor field. Nanomachines were cheap, but without human pilots, they were fodder.
    Marx decided not to challenge fate. "Take over the backups," he ordered Oczar. "Maybe you'll catch up with us yet."
    "If you're not dead already, sir."
    "Not likely, Pilot," Marx said flatly.
    Without engine noise, sensory emissions, or outgoing transmissions to alert the interceptors to their presence, the remaining four Intelligencers had been practically invisible for the last minute. But as Marx gave his craft the wake-up order, he felt a twinge of nerves. You never knew what had happened to your nanoship while it was running blind and silent.
    As its sensory web unfurled, the microscopic world around his small craft came into focus. Of course, what Pilot Marx saw in his canopy was the most abstract of representations. The skirt of tiny fiber cameras encircling the Intelligencer provided some video, but at this scale objects were largely unintelligible to the human eye. The view was enhanced by millimeter radar and high-frequency sonar, the reflections from which were shared among the squadron's viewpoints. The Lynx's AI also had a hand in creating the view. It generalized certain kinds of motion—the thrashing of the interceptors, for instance—that were too fast for the human eye. The AI also extrapolated friendly and enemy positions from current course and speed, compensating for the delay caused by the four-hundred-kilometer round trip of transmission. At this scale, those milliseconds mattered.
    The view lightened, still blurry. The altimeter read fifteen centimeters. Marx checked right and left, then over his shoulder. It was strangely dark behind him.
    Something was wrong.
    "Check my tail, Hendrik," he ordered.
    "Orienting." As she banked her craft to align its sensory array with the rear of his Intelligencer, the view began to sharpen.
    He'd been hit.
    A single interceptor had bitten his craft, its claw clinging to the casing of the stabilizer rotary wing. As the craft unfurled, the interceptor began to thrash, calling for help.
    "Hendrik! I'm hooked!"
    "Coming in to help, sir," Hendrik responded. "I'm the closest."
    "No! Stay clear. It knows I'm alive now." When the interceptor had first attached, catching the silent and falling Intelligencer with the random luck of a drift net, it couldn't be certain whether its prey was a nanomachine, or simply a speck of dust or an errant curtain thread. But now that the Intelligencer was powered and transmitting, the interceptor was sure it had live prey. It was releasing mechanopheromones to attract other interceptors. If Hendrik came in, she would soon be under attack as well.
    Marx had to escape on his own. And quickly.
    He swore. He should have unfurled slower, taken a look before becoming fully active. If only the ExO hadn't called, hadn't rushed him.
    Marx rotated his view 180 degrees, so that he was staring straight at his attacker, and brought his main turret camera to bear. He could see the interceptor clearly now. Its skin was translucent in the bright sunlight that filled