Symbionts

by William H. Keith

  “I doubt that,” Brenda said. “It’s two kilometers across and must weigh a hundred million tons at least. I don’t care what kind of metabolism it has, it wouldn’t be able to generate enough energy to move. My guess is that it’s some kind of large building.”

  “Yes? How do we tell?” Sergei Androyev replied, clearly frustrated. The bushy-haired linguist from New America’s Ukrainian colony was one of Ortiz’s best people. “If it has weapons, we can’t see them. It’s clearly hollow because the DalRiss appear to be moving inside, but there is quite frankly no way of determining its function.”

  “Not from up here, at any rate,” Brenda said. “It’s a strange idea for a bunch of xenolinguists, I know, but we could go down and ask them.”

  “Do they know we’re here, do you think?” Dev asked.

  “Almost certainly,” Androyev replied. “We know the DalRiss have radio. In fact, they appear to be quite sensitive to radio emissions, the way we are to light.”

  “That’s right. They have some kind of radio-sensitive organs, don’t they?” Lieutenant Commander Fletcher said.

  “According to our interviews with them,” Brenda said, “going back to First Contact, they first became aware of Hegemony civilization through our radio emissions. We know they can understand our language now, and we’ve been beaming messages at them over several radio frequencies, both in Inglic and in Nihongo. They know we’re here and they know we’re fighting against the Empire. They just haven’t answered us as yet.”

  “Maybe broadcasting radio at them isn’t such a good idea,” Lisa Canady suggested. “For them it might be like a bright light in the eyes would be for us.”

  “Anything’s possible,” Ortiz admitted. “But they seemed to respond well to radio dialogues beamed at them by 1-IEF three years ago. And presumably, that’s how the Imperials have been talking with them lately. The Japanese don’t much enjoy communication through the cornels, I gather.”

  “The ones in the Expeditionary Force certainly didn’t like getting their hands dirty,” a senior programmer tech pointed out. “It had to do with actually wearing a living creature, I think. They tended to be pretty fastidious about sticking bare skin into anything that looks as nasty as a cornel.”

  Several people in the linkage chuckled at that, including Dev, who’d worn the DalRiss translators on numerous occasions. Cornels, the living creatures designed by the DalRiss to facilitate direct emotional communication between wildly divergent species, were disconcerting to people who hadn’t used them before. Many refused point-blank to touch the things, which resembled nothing so much as soft, black or gray pools of tar or thick jelly imbued with a quivering, greasy-slick life of their own.

  No one was sure where the name “cornel” had come from originally. Some thought it sounded like the DalRiss word for them, though the DalRiss spoken language was so complex, involving parallel sounds and voices, that it was difficult to isolate individual chains of sounds from any single spoken phrase. Others preferred the more mundane suggestion that the genegineered organisms had originally been designated “Communicators, Living” by Imperial military scientists who studied them, a term that in Inglic readily shortened to “com-L.” Whatever the origin of the name, however, they’d proven invaluable, not so much for bridging the language gap between humans and the DalRiss, which the DalRiss themselves didn’t seem to regard as much of a problem, but for allowing communication between humans and the utterly inhuman Nagas.

  “I certainly think our best chances lie with using the cornel,” Ortiz said. “It was their invention, after all.”

  “And if the Imperials haven’t been using them,” Katya pointed out, “that’s an important distinction between us and them. It might make the DalRiss more sympathetic to us.”

  “Okay,” Dev said. “Face-to-face contact is always best, I’d agree to that. Whatever we decide to do, though, whatever approach we use to make contact, I suggest we do it fast. We only have a limited amount of time to try to communicate with these people, remember.”

  “How long?” Ortiz asked.

  Dev shrugged, then remembered that his analogue was not visible in the simulation, that the others could hear but not see him.

  “At the very best, six to eight months,” he told her. “That’s how long it will take that destroyer and the freighters that escaped after the battle to get back to Shichiju space and tell the Imperial Staff Command that we’re out here. The Imperials can’t afford to let us have exclusive communications with the DalRiss. Even if we haven’t figured out how to go about doing it yet.

  “At the worst, well, they could be breaking out of K-T space at the edge of the ShraRish system right this moment. The Imperials in the Shichiju would’ve learned about Dojinko, about the problems with the DalRiss, before we did. They’ll have been taking their time about assembling a relief fleet, but that fleet will be here, and I’d be willing to bet it’ll be here damned soon. We’ll have to be ready to up stakes and clear out just as quick as it takes to load our people aboard an ascraft and get them up to orbit.”

  “And abandon the DalRiss?” Katya said, anger flaring. “When are we going to stand and fight for a change?”

  “When we have a chance of winning,” Dev told her bluntly. He’d heard the pain of the unhealed wound in her voice but ignored it. This wasn’t the time or place to discuss the ethics of war.

  “We should probably go straight for cornel communications,” Hagan suggested, verbally insinuating himself between Dev and Katya. “At least that will show them that we want to communicate. They might not recognize our current radio broadcasts as anything more than ‘hello, how are you.’ ”

  “Commander Hagan has a good point,” Andreyev said. “We know that the DalRiss understand our language, the actual words, but we’re still not sure how much of the meaning they attach to those words corresponds with the meaning we attach to them.”

  “You’re saying ‘Hello, how are you’ could be a ritual death threat for them?” Katya asked.

  “Maybe not that, exactly, but that’s the idea. Most human greetings convey certain social postures and attitudes. ‘I am friendly. I have no weapon in my hand. I care about your well-being.’ Such sentiments tend to lose their meaning over a long period of time and become little more than a social ritual. But we have no idea what they would mean to a DalRiss.”

  “Ah,” Dev said. “Maybe for them ‘I have no weapon’ means ‘Hi there, I’m your breakfast.’ Or, ‘I care about your welfare’ means ‘Hey, how would you like to mate?’ ”

  Most of the others laughed. “That,” Andreyev said, a little stuffily, “is perhaps the general idea.”

  “The next question we have,” Dev said, “is where do we make contact?

  “We seem to have a choice there,” Katya pointed out. “The original plan called for going in and taking down the Imperials at their surface base first, then talking to the DalRiss who were on the site. That might not be practical at this point, though, since all the DalRiss at Dojinko appear to have uprooted, literally, and moved elsewhere. Alternatively, we could ignore the Imperials—they don’t seem to be much of a threat now—and try a landing close to Migrant Camp. At least we know we’ll find the DalRiss there.”

  “I think,” Dev said slowly, “that our best course of action will be to stick to the plan as written. We could be violating some taboo or law by showing up uninvited at Migrant Camp, and if that starfish in the middle of town is some sort of military structure, our arrival could be seen as a threat. We’d be better off, I think, grounding near the Impie base. If the DalRiss are feuding with the Japanese, it won’t hurt to show the natives that we are too. And I think it’ll be important to try talking to them at the same place where the Imperials have been working with them. We still don’t know how unified DalRiss society is, or if it even corresponds well to what humans think of as a social structure. If we land at Migrant Camp, we might discover that none of the locals know about humans.”

  “Unlikel
y, that last,” Ortiz said. “Considering the fact that humans are responsible for ending the long DalRiss war with the Nagas, I doubt very much that there’s a Riss on the whole planet who doesn’t know about us in one way or another. Still, I think you’re right about the need to take up communications with the DalRiss at the same place the Imperials evidently left off. There could be symbolic value in that… and we’ll be facing fewer unknowns.”

  “Then we’re agreed,” Dev said. “Katya? The sooner we get your people down there, the better. How soon can you go?”

  “We just need as long as it takes to file One-slash-one aboard an ascraft and deorbit,” she said, referring to the 1st Rangers’ First Company. “Say two hours.”

  “We’re coming up on ship’s night,” Dev said. “Why don’t we give your people a last, good night’s sleep? God knows how long it’ll be before they have someplace to rack out besides the link modules of their warstriders. Muster aboard your ascraft at 0800 hours tomorrow.”

  “Zero-eight hundred it will be, Commodore.”

  “You’ll be pretty much under your own discretion, Katya, though I’ll want to maintain full linkage with you all the way. Your overall directives will be first to assess and eliminate the Imperial threat—and I’ll rely on your judgment as to just how you carry that out—and then to attempt to make contact with the DalRiss. Again, your judgment.”

  “Wait,” Ortiz said. “Shouldn’t the Contact Team be along for that, Commodore?”

  “Negative, Professor. Not this time, not with this many unknowns. We’ll have you packed aboard an ascraft though and ready to deorbit just as soon as Colonel Alessandro gives the word. Once the Impies are cleaned up, once we have at least some acknowledgment that the DalRiss are willing to talk to us, then we’ll send you down.”

  “I think you’re making a mistake there,” Ortiz said, the frown showing in her voice.

  “Maybe. But until we’ve sized up the political situation down there, this is still a military mission, with military objectives and prerogatives. I promise you, the colonel won’t go in shooting. Not at the DalRiss, anyway.”

  The discussion turned next to the mechanics of contact and to what the Confederation Expeditionary Force hoped to accomplish, assuming, of course, that the Empire gave them time.

  Dev was feeling noticeably better now that the mission was properly under way. He’d given in to the monitor’s suggested regime of recreational linking and alpha wave control, and possibly that was helping as well. He’d noticed in any case that he felt worst when he wasn’t jacked in, best when he was enjoying a full, three-jack download. He no longer dreamed as much about what had happened on Herakles. His earlier depression was largely gone, too, though there was a lurking nostalgia for the far vaster sweep of experience and knowledge and being that had been his during the Xenolink. The longing for that vaster, inner world was controllable when he was linked, with immediate access to literally any knowledge and experience he wished to have. Only when he was out of link, with nothing to rely on but his own native abilities and the few gigs of implanted RAM in his brain, did he really feel the impact of his loss.

  If only he could just somehow manage to stay linked all the time.…

  Chapter 20

  Warstriders found their first military application in the Manchurio-Japanese War of 2207. It was that conflict, incidentally, that demonstrated once and for all Imperial Ninon’s technological lead over the other nations of Earth, a clear result of her having seized the high ground of space during the previous two hundred years.

  Significantly, though, there were relatively few new developments in warstrider technology during the next three centuries. There were experiments, of course, with changes in size, in numbers and types of weapons, in control systems, sensor packages, and armor, but the basic idea—an armored combat machine controlled by the directly channeled neural impulses of a cephlinked pilot has remained virtually unchanged since its inception.

  —Modern Military Hardware

  HEMILCOM Military Documentary

  C.E. 2537

  The ascraft, a VK-141 Stormwind, slanted in from the southwest nose high, kicking up a swirl of dust and fragments of vegetation as the ventral thrusters cut in. Four bulky, roughly egg-shaped packages disengaged two at a time from slots beneath the ascraft’s down-canted wings, tumbled free, then steadied in bursts of hot plasma. As each touched down on howling, twin jets, side and bottom panels swung open, articulated joints unfolded, legs and arms and weapons pods deployed in smooth-moving parodies of the motions of a living creature. One after another, the machines went into full combat mode, rising on jointed digitigrade legs, weapons and sensors alike extended and scanning their surroundings. Their armored hulls shimmered as the nanoflage coating them adjusted to the new surroundings, taking on the mottled, gold-orange hues of the vegetation in the area. They didn’t vanish—quite—but when the machines froze in place, their outlines all but disappeared, making a firm ID difficult. When they moved, their outlines blurred, while the color patterns twisted and moved as though the strider’s entire outer surface was paneled with mirrors.

  The first four warstriders were down unopposed. As the Stormwind’s thrusters shrieked and the bulky craft pivoted in place, then rose once more into the sky, a second ascraft drifted in out of the southwest, followed by a third and a fourth, each stooping to disgorge its own complement of warstriders in a ragged line to either side of the first team. There were sixteen in all, a full platoon consisting of a mix of light and medium machines: RLN-90 Scoutstriders, Ares-12 Swiftstriders, and LaG-42 Ghostriders.

  The largest was an RS-64GC Warlord, with the legend Assassin’s Blade picked out in white script on its armored prow, and as the machine swung about, the warm, background colors reflected by its nanoflage surged and rippled behind the letters. Tucked away within its three jackerslots, Katya, Sublieutenant Ryan Green, and Warrant Tech Kurt Allen were linked to the Warlord’s systems. Green was piloting, Allen was jacked to the primary weapons, while Katya concentrated on running the platoon.

  “Skyfall, Skyfall,” she announced over the ground-to-orbit frequency. “Dagger is down.”

  “Dagger, Skyfall, we copy that,” the voice of Eagle’s Battle Ops officer replied in her head. “We’ve got you pegged at the primary LZ, with no hostiles or unknowns in your immediate area. Your objective is at zero-three-five, range five point two kilometers. You should have Point Alfa in sight to your northeast.”

  Checkpoint Alfa was a low, bare-topped ridge three kilometers from the landing zone, easily recognizable from the simulated runs Katya had worked on aboard the Eagle. “Roger that. I see it.”

  “Your objective should be in sight from there. How’s the weather down there?”

  “Hot,” she replied, glancing at her met readouts. “And muggy. With a chance of acid rain. But no bandits. None that’ve shown themselves, anyway. Plenty of background noise, though. There could be an army out there, and if they weren’t powered up, we’d never see them.”

  They’d landed in a broad clearing extending west from the ridge and almost encircled by forest. Their surroundings felt distinctly alive, with rustlings and subtle shiftings among the vegetation. The tallest were slender with fernlike or spearlike tips thirty meters or more above the ground, and some had a feathery look almost reminiscent of the virgin native forests back on New America. Most were rounder and squatter, though, like huge mushrooms or bloated puffballs or stacked layers of shelf fungus, while others possessed surreal clumps of light-gathering foliage that resembled huge, ragged natural sponges, all holes and pits and tatters with lots of interconnecting branches like jackstraws. Some of the vegetation exuded a thick orange or pink foam that dripped from the canopy and covered the ground, soaking up sunlight and somehow transferring it to the parent organism.

  There was no sign of animal life on any of Katya’s scanners, though many of the plants, including the spongy, sheetlike growths the striders were trampling underfoot, were in constant
rippling or pulsing motion. Overhead, the sky was violet-blue, with scattered clouds tinged with sulfurous yellow.

  “That way,” she told her pilot, indicating the ridge to the northeast. “Low and fast.”

  “Right, Skipper.”

  “Dagger, Dagger One. Deploy and move out!”

  The Warlord lurched forward, then shifted into a sprint, the easy, scissoring movements of its birdlike legs providing a relatively smooth ride, though each long step caused the fuselage to swoop in what a newbie could find to be a disorienting fashion. It was an old machine, one handed down from unit to unit with patches and replacement parts to show its checkered history. Blade’s main fuselage, Katya knew, had been cast in 2489, and it had seen service with a Hegemony line unit for eighteen years before it was sold to a New American militia unit. The body of her warstrider was damn near twice Katya’s age, older by nine years than the Xenophobe War.

  Older machines like this one had been the mainstay of the various Hegemony and local militia units fighting the Xenos, and they’d given a good account of themselves. This time, though, the enemy wasn’t Xenophobes. The black hull armor of those Tachis and the Katana glimpsed by the remote probe earlier suggested that the Dojinko defenders were Imperial Marines, with few exceptions the best troops and machines Dai Nihon possessed.

  They reached the base of the ridge without incident and started to climb, the other warstriders of the platoon stretching out in a line to either side, each close enough to its neighbors to keep them in sight. Katya didn’t need to give more than an absolute minimum of orders. The veterans in her team knew what they were doing and knew what she expected of them; the newbies had had plenty of training and drill back on New America, and the majority of them were veteran warstriders from various Hegemony units. The true test of any military formation was how well it stood up under battle, of course, and that had yet to be tested, but Katya had been careful to select her best people for this mission. She was confident that they’d be able to face anything the Imperials threw at them, and win.