Warstrider: All Six Novels and An Original Novella

by Ian Douglas

  Katya.

  She almost got hung up trying to unhook the spool attached at the chest of her descent harness, but she got free at last, unslung her subgun, and strode toward him, stiffly determined. "Dev?"

  "I'm okay, Katya." With sudden insight, he knew what that descent into the dark had cost her. "What . . . what are you doing here?"

  "Looking for you." He saw her eyes go wide behind her helmet visor. Her helmet light swept past him, gleaming against the living wall. "Is that, that thing behind you what I think it is?"

  Dev managed a smile. "This, people, is a Xenophobe." His smile broadened. "Bad name. It isn't afraid of us. Doesn't hate us. For it, life is nothing but tunneling and expanding and reproducing and growing and always, always, always seeking warmth, filling the Rock, turning Not-Self into Self. But then you meet someone who makes you stop and think. . . . "

  Wilkins stepped closer, but cautiously, the muzzle of her Steyr-Hitachi wavering uncertainly. "Lieutenant, you are making no sense whatsoever. Maybe you'd like to start over?"

  "To think," Dev said slowly, "that all we had to do was explain things. I mean, part of it died, and suddenly the universe just didn't look the same anymore." Sobering, he shook his head, painfully aware of how disjointed his words sounded as he tried to assimilate the . . . strangeness. His head hurt. " 'It' . . . that's the wrong word. Too impersonal. Maybe we just don't have the right words."

  He paused, blinking as another thought occurred to him. "Better put your guns down, people," he said. "I think our war may be over."

  Katya turned her full attention on Dev. "Can we trust it?" she asked. And Dev heard the unspoken question: Can we trust you? Has it done something to your mind?

  "We can trust it," he said with careful deliberation. Too much revelation, too soon, and they would be convinced that it wasn't Devis Cameron speaking. Contact with it had changed him, but not in the way they feared. He took a deep breath, worked to steady his voice. "It's a machine. A very large, very complex machine made up of God knows how many trillions of computers, each the size of a bacterium. Electrochemical computers manufactured—grown—from the equivalent of nucleoproteins."

  Katya looked doubtful. "Who grew them? Where did it come from?"

  Dev hesitated, choosing his words. "We have a kind of symbiosis with our machines, right? With nanotechnology, we can grow computers inside our brains, inside our skin, make them a part of us, a way for us to interact with the rest of the world. So much so, it's hard to imagine life without them.

  "Okay, now imagine a . . . a life-form. I can remember a little of it, like fragments of a grainy, two-D film. Evolved on a very old planet, circling a red dwarf sun, deep underground, maybe in a pocket of water warmed by the planet's molten core. A primitive organism, but evolved to its absolute highest potential over billions of years. Imagine what it would have been like if tunicates or molluscs had evolved to intelligence on Earth.

  "Locked away deep in the rock, it . . . they were cut off from the rest of the universe. Evolution must have been slow, slow, with nothing but the natural radioactivity of the rocks to cause mutation and change. But there would have been competition for raw materials. For warmth. They were thermovores, always seeking heat. It doesn't seem possible, but maybe that was enough stimulus for them to evolve intelligence. To become self-aware.

  "Imagine how they perceived the universe. There was Self. There was Rock. There were the openings in the Rock they made . . . Emptiness. Not-Rock. Everything else—water, heat—was variations of Rock."

  "Sounds like the old idea of elements," Katya said. "Earth, Air, Fire, Water."

  Dev nodded. "Kind of a simplistic cosmology. But it fit what they were aware of. Eventually they developed nanotechnics."

  "Whoa there," Wilkins said. "How could they go straight from stone age to nanotechnics?"

  Dev smiled. "For them, their 'stone age' was nanotechnics. Their first tools. They must've learned to manipulate molecules inside their own bodies, probably to get raw materials for growth from the rock. Or to tunnel out larger living spaces for themselves. Or to break hydrogen and oxygen out of certain rocks to make more water. Millions of cell-sized machines, made from minerals drawn from the rock, could be joined together into larger structures. Machines that could carry the organic components of this symbiosis, keep them wet and alive even when the underground seas dried up, or tunnel deeper as the planet's core cooled. If they worked at it long enough, for billions of years . . .

  "My guess is that they evolved with the Galaxy's first generation of Population I stars, ten or twelve billion years ago. It must have been eight or ten billion years more—twice as long as Earth or any of the other worlds we know have even existed—before they finally made it to the stars.

  "And when they did, they carried with them a view of the universe that was completely inside out."

  Dev tried to explain what he had picked up from the One only in fragments of passed-on memory, pictures and sensations imperfectly understood, imperfectly transmitted.

  For most of those billions of years, the Xenophobes had slowly developed side by side with their submicroscopic technology, utilizing tailored proteins as computers, with the equivalent of nucleic acids as records, enzymes as encoders and readers, viral bodies as packets of tightly encoded data, a mimicry of biological life but deliberately shaped and molded for ever-increasing efficiency. Separate organisms communicated with one another, exchanging data packets first by chemical, later by electrical means.

  Organism and machine were utterly dependent on each other. The dual organism expanded to utilize the entire crust of its homeworld. Ultimately the original life-form that had used nanotechnics to secure its place within its world was absorbed by its own technology. Cells patterned succeeding generations of cells, and what did it matter whether the original pattern was natural or artificial? As the distinction between organic and inorganic vanished, so, too, did distinctions between individuals. Like separate neurons linked together into a vast network capable of acquiring, processing, and storing data, the multitude of individuals, linked together through the millions of kilometers of chambers and tunnels that filled the planet's crust, became the One.

  As with any life-form, change forced adaptation. The underground seas dried up; the One manufactured its own water and, ultimately, adapted the subunits of its form to the harsher environment by wrapping each in gelatinous, water-filled shells. The planetary core continued to shrink and cool; the One expanded its caverns, learned to use electromagnetic fields to warp rock into easily traversable paths, learned to remake rock, atom by atom, into shapes that suited its needs.

  Ultimately the One must have converted most of the planet's crust into a vast machine for collecting and transmitting heat.

  "But their world was dying," Dev said. "They got some heat from their sun, but they must have known that, sooner or later, the planetary core would be cold and dead, and that would be the end of them."

  "And that's when they learned how to build starships?" Katya asked. "I don't see how they could without heavy industry. You can't make K-T drives out of cells."

  "The DalRiss grow their ships," Dev reminded her. "And they don't use the K-T plenum. In the case of the One, it was simpler still. Remember the travel pods?"

  "Those are the Xeno spaceships?" Katya asked.

  "Or something like them."

  "But at sublight speeds, it would have taken years. . . ."

  "Millions of years, Katya. They did it blindly, flinging pods filled with life into space.

  "You see, they didn't know about the stars. And the . . . the living component of the symbiosis was crippled because it didn't know, couldn't know what the universe was really like.

  "They couldn't see. They couldn't sense position the way we can tell where our arm is even with our eyes closed. All they knew was warmth and Rock and empty space and Self. They constructed a picture of the universe that was essentially an infinity of Rock. Inside that Rock is an enormous empty sp
ace. Going out from that empty space, it gets warmer . . . and warmer, until it's too hot and the pressures are too great to sustain life."

  "Like the people who once thought Earth was flat," Katya said, "balanced on the shell of a tortoise."

  "Exactly. When they launched their life pods toward the stars, what they thought they were doing was launching them out into that huge central cavern they thought of as a kind of Void of Not-Rock. They were trying to reach another part of Rock, a place not yet occupied by Self. Thousands of pods must have been sent out. Maybe millions. They drifted through space for millions of years, guided—maybe—by nanotechnic machines on board that could sense magnetic fields. Nearly all of them must have been lost, out there among the stars. Lots more must have homed on stars . . . and found more heat than they bargained for.

  "Or maybe they could recognize the danger, and had control enough to find cooler, more habitable pieces of Rock."

  "Planets," Katya said quietly. "Like Loki."

  "And GhegnuRish and all the others. Those that survived the trip landed, the pods opened, and the passengers started tunneling." He shook his head. "Other parts of the vast cave in the heart of the universe.

  "I think a kind of life cycle evolved. What we call Xenophobes land on a planet, dig themselves in, and begin spreading through the planet's crust looking for heat, tunneling deep on cold planets like Loki, spreading out near the surface on warmer planets like GhegnuRish. They take the world over, fill it with life, their kind of life. When the crust is filled . . . they launch another generation to the stars."

  "I still don't understand why we've never seen their travel pods in space," Bayer said. "They'd be easy enough to detect."

  "Sure. But we haven't seen them because they arrived a long time ago. How long do you think it takes for a handful of organisms to spread through the planetary crust of an entire world? I think the first Xenos must have landed on Loki hundreds of thousands of years ago. Maybe longer."

  Katya looked startled. "Like an infection. They could have spread through this entire part of the Galaxy. They could already be on Earth, in Earth, buried deep."

  "A distinct possibility. They'd only make themselves known if they rose from the warm depths looking for heat from the sun or raw materials from our technology. We were right, Katya. They don't think in terms of, oh, refining iron into steel. Or manufacturing their own nano films or durasheathing. But if they can get at it, their nanotechnic disassemblers can take it apart and reuse it elsewhere. They found our cities to be quite useful that way."

  "They never even knew we were there."

  "Oh, they knew there was something there. They knew when they were being attacked, when parts of the Self were dying. And they adapted. They took pieces of our own equipment, modified it to fit the surroundings—"

  "Alpha stalkers were never our equipment. Or magnetic travel pods. And we got the idea for nano-D shells from them! Where did they come from?"

  "Katya, these . . . beings have been spreading from system to system for a long time. Hundreds of millions, maybe billions of years. The machine we call a Fer-de-Lance might be technology remembered from a war with some other species a million years ago. The travel pods were part of their original nanotechnology, capsules for moving through the rock where temperatures and pressures would be too much for unprotected organisms. The patterns are all stored in their computer memory, and passed on with each new wave of colonists. Each new world is a new One. One world doesn't communicate with another. They simply utilize their world, send another generation of colonists toward the sky, and . . . think.

  "The tragedy was that, with their inside-out worldview, they could never conceive of another intelligence, outside of their own. As far as they were concerned, they were simply utilizing the resources of their universe. Adapting. Surviving. They could never even approach their full potential with the baggage of their old, organic philosophy.

  "But by the same token, they never had the . . . intuition that would let them overcome that philosophy. They couldn't innovate, only react. Maybe, in the end, they were more like machines than organic life after all."

  Dev looked at the cavern walls surrounding the little group of humans. The One, the tiny part of it that he could see, was quiescent, patiently waiting.

  "Now, though, it's come into contact with a different worldview. It's learned something new, maybe for the first time in millennia. And I think . . . I think it wants to know more about the universe."

  Katya reached out, touching his arm. The contact was warm. Reassuring. "It could tell what you were thinking?"

  Dev nodded. "It saw, through my link, a little bit of the way we see the universe—how we see space, a Galaxy of three hundred billion stars, planets, other galaxies beyond ours. And people. Relationships. Change. Variety. I don't think it understood even one percent of what it saw. What it felt. But . . . "

  "But what? What was it feeling?"

  "More than anything else?" He closed his eyes, feeling again that alien tide. "Wonder . . ."

  Chapter 35

  Compared to what's Out There, every human culture and somatotype, from Imperial Japanese to New American Outback Ranger to !Kung to gene-tailored Freefaller, is identical. To most of what's Out There, humans, planaria, and tree ferns are as similar as makes no difference. Maybe, someday, that realization will be the salvation of our species.

  —Life in the Universe

  Dr. Taylor Chung

  C.E. 2470

  Dev sat in the most luxurious room he'd ever seen in his life, despite the fact that there was little furniture. The awards ceremony was over and he ached to get back to his assigned quarters and out of his dress grays, but the invitation, unprecedented as it was, could not possibly have been refused.

  He sat tatami-fashion on the padded floor before the low, richly ornamented table. Katya knelt beside him on his right, with General Varney next to her. The silhouettes of guards stood motionless behind translucent walls.

  Opposite, an old and wrinkled man sipped tea from a perfect cup. He did not, Dev thought, look much like his portraits. "The Empire," he said, carefully placing the cup before him, "owes you a debt of gratitude, Chu-i Cameron-san. A debt that can never be truly paid back. Certainly not with trinkets."

  His new rank still felt uncomfortable, as did the starburst at his throat.

  The Imperial Star.

  The Emperor seemed to read his thoughts. "I remember your father, Cameron-san. He was a brave, an honorable man. His loss is deeply felt. I wish he could be here with us now, to share your honor, and to see how his son has brought an end to the Human-Xeno War."

  Dev looked hard at the Emperor but could detect no deeper meaning beyond the simple words. Strange. A thousand years before, this man would have been revered as a descendant of the sun god. Now he was just a man . . . but an immensely powerful one, a man who could make or break an officer's career with a word. It would not be wise to contradict him.

  "The war is not over yet, Your Majesty," Dev said. "All I really learned out there is that it may never be over."

  That was true enough. The One of GhegnuRish knew nothing of its offspring, blindly flung against the stars, or of other Ones hidden in the worlds of neighboring suns, even suns as close as Alya A and B. Dev's discovery had proven only that each separate world-entity would have to be approached and shown the reality of the universe separately.

  How many worlds did the Xenophobes occupy already? Dev had never been able to determine just how many generations of space-faring life pods there'd been, or how distant the original Xenophobe homeworld had been. Xenophobes—unconverted Ones—might inhabit every planet in the Galaxy with a molten core and a significant magnetic field.

  And there was no way to tell how those other Ones would react when they were contacted. Each One was an individual, reacting to its own environment, unaware of the Ones of other worlds. Each had a long and bloody heritage, a racial memory written in the genocides of entire species, to overcome.
>
  Genocide on a planetary scale. On a galactic scale.

  The Emperor had been silent for a long time. He stirred now, as if throwing off some troubling thought. "Are you familiar with the novae of Aquila?"

  Dev leaned back on his haunches, extracting data from his RAM. Yes, he'd picked up something about that, one of the tidbits acquired years before when he'd read everything that he could about the stars. There was an area of Earth's sky, he'd learned, in the direction of the constellation Aquila the Eagle, where there'd once been a higher-than-expected number of novae—exploding stars. During one forty-year period in the first half of the twentieth century, twenty-five percent of all of the bright novae observed from Earth had appeared in an area equivalent to a quarter of one percent of the entire sky; two had appeared in one year alone—1936—and Nova Aquila of 1918 had been the brightest recorded in three centuries, outshining every star in the sky but Sirius.

  "I've been thinking about those exploding suns," the Emperor said quietly. "They're much farther away than Alya A and B. Nova Aquila, I believe, was twelve hundred light-years distant. But all lie in the same general direction from Earth."

  True. Eagle Sector embraced the neighboring constellations of Aquila, Serpens, Ophiuchus, Scutum, Sagitarius—a tiny part of the sky lying in the general direction of the Galactic Core. Alya—Theta Serpentis—lay right on the border between Serpens and Aquila, only three degrees from the site of the nova of 1918. In galactic terms, the line from Nova Aquilae to Alya to Sol was almost a straight line.

  Had someone else been confronted by the Xenophobe threat in C.E. 700 and sought to deal with it in a direct and uncompromising fashion? How many of the Xenophobe pods that had spread to worlds of the Shichiju had been fleeing the wholesale destruction of their planets' stars? The memories passed on by the One were still confused and tangled, but Dev saw there images of warfare and titanic struggle, age following age of genocidal war.