Warstrider: Symbionts by Ian Douglas

Author:Ian Douglas [Douglas, Ian]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Space Fleet, Galactic Empire, Science Fiction & Fantasy, Science Fiction, Space Marine, Adventure, Military
Amazon: B00MW964TI
Publisher: War Planet Press
Published: 2014-08-18T12:00:00+00:00

Chapter 18

Where earlier advances in communications and electronics represented obvious progress in Man's technical evolution, the development of cephlink technology represented a leap greater than those earlier developments by many orders of magnitude. Where earlier advances might be compared to the biological evolution of the eye, say, or of chordate anatomy, the cephlink could be compared to one of those unforeseen shifts in evolutionary direction that created whole new universes for life to exploit—comparable, say, to the colonization of the land, or the invention of sex. Many today accept human-cephlink cyborgs as an entirely new order of creature, as distinct from homo sapiens as the amphibian is from the fish and with the same, greater evolutionary promise.

—The Rise of Technic Man

Fujiwara Naramoro

C.E. 2535

Seen from orbit, ShraRish was exactly as Katya remembered it. Like Dev, she'd last orbited the world aboard the transport Yuduki, one of the armada of Hegemony and Imperial ships that had visited the twin Alyan system back in 2541. Its small oceans and landlocked seas gleamed purple beneath the blaze of Alya A, while the land was covered in vegetation that overall looked gold, but which when examined closely showed a beautiful mottling of orange, brown, ocher, yellow, red, and pink.

And the mountains. She'd forgotten the mountains. Three billion years younger than Earth, ShraRish was more tectonically active by far than that relatively placid and middle-aged world. From orbit, the largest ranges looked like wrinklings in the skin of overripe fruit; active volcanos were marked by thousand-kilometer plumes of gray-brown smoke and ash, while on the planet's night hemisphere the eruptions showed as sullen red pinpoints wreathed in the silent throb and pulse of lightning storms. The nightside, too, was brought alive by the planet's auroral displays and meteor falls. With a more active, energetic sun than Earth, the darkness-shrouded portions of the polar areas of this world were always crowned by pale, shifting circlets of light, while a sharp eye could discern the steady flicker and streak of meteors vaporizing as they struck atmosphere.

Two hours earlier, Eagle had entered low orbit around ShraRish and her hab modules had been set to rotating, providing a half G of spin-gravity. Valiant and Rebel were still enroute; the frigate had finally been freed from the wreckage of her drive module by surgically directed laser bursts from the corvette and was now being brought in under tow. The rest of the squadron was with Eagle in orbit, as the widely scattered fighters of the 1st Wing continued to straggle in. Mirach and the Confederation freighters were inbound from their vantage point at the frontiers of the Alyan system.

The entire squadron was still on full alert, but unless the enemy had more ships hidden somewhere with reactors scrammed and power sources shut down, it looked as though the Confederation now controlled near-ShraRish space. Two Imperial freighters had been caught by Tarazed's warflyers before they could break orbit. The others, together with the lone surviving Imperial destroyer, had made the translation to K-T space and were long gone, almost certainly on their way back to the Shichiju.

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