Warstrider: All Six Novels and An Original Novella

by Ian Douglas

  She knew her thoughts were babbling on, almost beyond her control. Somehow, somehow, she had to establish meaningful communication with the Xenophobe. . . .

  No! Not "Xenophobe." It thought of itself as "Self," or as "the One," or, in some twisted sense just barely within Katya's comprehension, as the means by which Rock knew itself. She caught another image: Child of the Night. Did it understand night? She doubted that. Perhaps that was her own interpretation of something not expressible in words, a sense that it perceives itself as having been spawned by the night-black gulf of the Void.

  "There are humans—things like me—that want to destroy you."

  Denial. Not possible. Rock protects. The Child of the Night survives.

  "It is possible. There is a weapon that . . . that changes rock into energy. Radiation. Great heat. They will do this to reach you even in the rock. To destroy you. They've already tried it, not long ago, at a place south of here."

  Understanding. Not "weapon" or "place" or "south," concepts that Self could not easily assimilate. But Self remembered pressure waves rippling through Rock, remembered Rock boiling, remembered the sharp pain of separation as a portion of Self, a far-outlying portion of Self, had been lost.

  Still, that incident had been no more important to Self than the frequent loss of bits of itself in the »self« probes it continuously sent into its surroundings.

  Far more keenly felt was something else, an astonishing emotion that threatened to overwhelm Self as it communicated with this dazzlingly not-Self point of view. The not-Self thought, reasoned, felt as Self did.

  Wonder!

  Katya had expected an argument. Self seemed to accept her statement about the nukes, however, without question. Did it read her urgency as an indication of truth? Or might this strange organism not understand the difference between the truth and a lie?

  There are humans called Imperials, she tried to explain. Humans who want to destroy you. There are other humans, humans like me, who don't want to do this. They want to communicate with you instead.

  Confusion. Paradox. How can not Self-thinking-thing both want and not want destruction of Self?

  "There are . . . fragments of yourself. They leave you, travel to the surface—"

  What is "surface"?

  "To the, uh, interface, then. The interface between Void and Rock. Those fragments—"

  »selves«

  "—fight enemies, gather information. They think for themselves—"

  —think for Self-—

  "—but they have different points of view—"

  —until they reunite with Self—

  "Okay! Think of humans as many, many »selves« that haven't reunited yet! They have different points of view! Some want to destroy Self. They are bad. Some want to talk. They are good. We need you to help the good humans fight the bad. . . ."

  Strangeness . . .

  What is "good"?

  What is "bad?"

  If "good" and "bad" are opposites, how can humans be both good and bad?

  Katya could feel just how thin her argument was. She'd glimpsed how Self perceived her—as a wisp of alien salts and pale heat. How could such a being possibly, possibly perceive the differences between Hegemony and Rebellion, between an Imperial Japanese and a rebel? Even she didn't believe her simplistic explanation of good against bad, and she was afraid that Self might perceive it as a lie . . . or as stark impossibility.

  God in heaven, Katya thought with sudden, new agony. Self was incapable of sensing the difference between male and female! It might well have trouble realizing that a human and, say, an oak tree were members of different species!

  Damn it, how much did the monstrous being around her understand?

  A warning note chimed in her ear, and with a suddenness that caught her totally unprepared, a dazzling flare of ruby light exploded in the darkness a hand's breadth beneath her chin.

  Laser . . .

  No. It was the darkness that had enveloped her for so long that had tricked her eyes. The dazzling red light was nothing more than a tiny LED indicator on the life support pack strapped over her breasts.

  It was warning her that she was almost out of air.

  Oh, God, don't let me die until I get through to this thing! I've got to talk to it, got to make it understand, but it doesn't understand you've got to understand please understand . . .

  There was much in what the not-Self was saying that Self could not grasp, much that tasted incomprehensible, like moving rock or a »self« that was somehow not a part of Self.

  Could there be a . . . a kind of Self, independent of Self and composed of many »selves« that could actually be divided against one another?

  Strange . . . though the idea might explain some of the not-Self things that had struggled with Self in the distant past, in other parts of the Universe of Rock. The not-Selves that had possessed the original patterns of the defenders, for instance.

  Within Self's own life cycle, the cells of its body multiplied until it inhabited a vast area of rock between the region where there was too much heat to sustain life and the great Void itself. When Self inhabited an area of Rock limited in some difficult-to-define way that restricted further growth, it cast pods filled with »selves« into the Void, pods that would navigate the magnetic currents of the Void until they reached some other, far, far distant part of the Rock-Void interface. Each, when it reached its destination, would grow into another Self.

  Another Self.

  Self rarely examined that curiously disorienting concept, but it knew the general idea to be fact, for its own inborn memories, replicated with each replication of its own cells, extended back . . . back . . . back across countless such crossings of the Void. From Self's point of view, its current awareness was simply a continuation of an earlier existence, but it knew, rationally, that there was at least a chance that others of the seed cast into the Void had reached Rock, burrowed into the depths, sought warmth, lived, replicated. . . .

  What would it be like to meet another Self, one with its own point of view, with its own chain of memories, related to but distinct from Self's own? What if, in the course of its endless expansion through the Universe of Rock, it were to encounter the outlying tendrils of such a separate Self?

  Could that be what was happening here?

  Not that this thing tasting of salt water and oxygen glowing in the sheltering hollow of Self's body was literally another Self or even a »self« . . . but . . . could it possibly be like Self with its own mind, its own thoughts and memories, its own existence within infinite Rock?

  The thoughts and images flowing across the bridge between the human and Self were almost painfully thin and sluggish. The thing, apparently, could move and react far more quickly than could Self, but its thoughts were laboriously slow. Self had time to taste and savor each in turn. The self-that-was-not-Self seemed to be in some distress. Somehow, in a way that Self did not entirely understand, its environment was degrading, threatening its survival.

  Why, then, did it not simply change its environment?

  Perhaps it was unlike Self after all.

  The red light was flashing now, the tone in her ear tolling her death. Her air was almost gone. Funny. She still didn't know what the air in this cavern was like. When her tanks were exhausted . . . would she strangle slowly in Eriduan air, with only nine percent oxygen at eight tenths of an atmosphere, or would she start breathing carbon dioxide or some other poison that would smother her in a few seconds? Almost, she wanted to tear the mask from her face, to take a breath and find out and get it over with all at once. She felt dizzy . . . and a little giddy. Maybe her reserves were already gone and she was slipping into the mental ramblings of oxygen starvation.

  Dev . . . why couldn't you have come with us? Perhaps it was part of the delirium. She thought that Dev was there, as she'd seen him at Kodama's party, and she knew with a hot, inner rush of feeling that she still loved him and wanted him even while she hated him for so completely embracing t
he Empire and all it stood for.

  If she just could have talked to him one more time, maybe she could have convinced him. . . .

  She wished she could leave him a message, but of course, no one would ever find her body or download her RAM, not when it was trapped here so very far beneath the surface in this living, literal hell of heat and darkness.

  There are humans like me up on the surface who can talk to you, she told the darkness. You can work with them to stop the enemy from destroying you or . . . or . . .

  Katya felt a dull shock in her arms and legs. She'd fallen to her knees, breaking contact with the Xenophobe. She couldn't get up. . . .

  There was no more air. Suffocation loosed Katya's rigidly bound claustrophobia, a nightmare storm of rising dread and horror. Convulsively, her fists clenched and she tried to scream, but no sound escaped the mask. For a moment, she stared at the winking red light as though it were her last link to light and life and sanity . . .

  . . . and then the blackness swallowed even that tiny flicker of illumination, as, consciousness fading, she sank facedown into the warm, unseen ooze.

  Chapter 20

  Xenos are natural-born chemists, real magicians when it comes to taking things apart or putting stuff together, atom by atom. If we ever learn how to get along with them, we max find them rendering our notions of nanotechnology obsolete.

  —from a report given before the

  Hegemony Council on Space Exploration

  Devis Cameron

  C.E. 2542

  Tendrils explored, probing the not-Self, sliding across alien surfaces, tasting chemistries strange to Self's experience. The . . . human, it had called itself . . . the human appeared to be a single integrated unit, like a single one of Self's cells, but massed perhaps sixty times more. Self withdrew as it tasted moisture . . . and the electrolytic bite of salt water.

  The human was organized in layers. Outermost was an intricate shell or partial covering of some sort, multilayered and woven through with myriad threads of silver, copper, and other metals. The next layer below that was clearly organic, of far finer and more labyrinthine detail than the outer skin, a tough but flexible membrane of dazzling complexity. . . .

  Threads of Self penetrated this deeper layer, still probing, expanding, tasting. Carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, sulfur, water, phosphates . . .

  Astonishing. Alien as this human-thing was, its body chemistry was similar in many respects to Self's own. Not identical, certainly. Self's body employed somewhat different percentages of the same elements, and some others, such as nickel and germanium, were not present in the human at all in measurable quantities. Self's body tissues were particularly rich in silicon, iron, and copper, elements which formed much of its electrically based internal communications network, as well as the complex of nanotechnic machines within its cells.

  The nature of the metabolism was different as well. Where Self converted heat to energy and assembled tissue from elements drawn from Rock, the human broke down sugars and other ingested, specialized compounds using oxygen drawn from its not-Rock surroundings. An iron-chelated protein in cells carried by an electrolytic circulatory fluid distributed oxygen through the organism and sequestered wastes for elimination.

  Strange . . .

  But at the level of basic chemistry the similarities between human and Self were far more numerous than the differences.

  One lateral extrusion or appendage on the human was coated with a specialized skin that showed yet another formof chemistry. It, too, consisted primarily of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and hydrogen. Self recognized it as distinct from thehuman. Might this be a "bad" human? Or was this some-thing else entirely? Like Self, it was a thermovore, drawing heat from the not-Self it clung to and converting it to energy. Tendrils infiltrated the mass, recognizing its translation program, adapting it. It called itself a comel . . . and clearly was an artificial construct, an organic symbiont artificially designed to facilitate direct neural transfer between Self and human.

  Wonder!

  And intense curiosity. Self had never imagined such diversity in a universe that until now had consisted of nothing but that which was Rock and that which was not. The comel provided the key to the images now flooding through Self's awareness.

  Self explored deeper, nanotechnic threads each a molecule or two wide extruding from the mass of cells cradling the human now, an almost invisible fuzz sinking through protective layers, sliding unnoticed between the molecules they sampled, growing rapidly, penetrating tissue, tasting, relaying data.

  Cells . . . not like the huge, detachable, and malleable units that made up Self's far-flung body, but minute, packaged miracles of chemistry. Cytoplasm and nucleus. Ribosomes, mitochondria, nucleotides, DNA, RNA . . . Self did not know the terminology but it analyzed the chemistry. This was quite different from Self's experience, but it understood most of the workings and could anticipate others. Some aspects of human physiology Self missed entirely. Sex, for example, was totally outside its experience, and the human's reproductive organs and processes were mysteries, completely unfathomable.

  Of particular interest were the artificial implants within the organ the human called a brain, though Self did not think of them as technological additions but as highly specialized and organized regions of silicon, cadmium, and other elements not found in other parts of the body. These areas had been nanotechnically grown in place and obviously served as data storage and transmission devices of some kind. Since its own intelligence required nanotechnic prostheses. Self took for granted the fact that the human used them as well.

  It took Self fifty-seven seconds to learn enough to realize that the human was dying. The notion of death was itself something of a revelation, since, though individual cells could be destroyed, Self as a whole could not die unless all of its cells ceased to function, and that was unthinkable . . . or had been until the human had suggested that Rock could be transformed into energy by "bad" humans. Self struggled to understand, to overcome prejudices determined by Self's own nature. The way the human organism was designed conferred upon it serious disadvantages. Why had it not adjusted its operation to a more convenient format?

  It took another thirty-two seconds for Self to determine why the human was dying. Part of its body covering, apparently, provided a gas mix, a self-contained atmosphere different from that within the not-Rock occupied by Self. That gas supply was nearly exhausted, though enough remained for Self to analyze. Evidently, the human required more oxygen than was available . . . while at the same time carbon dioxide was beginning to poison its metabolism.

  That was simple enough to correct. Self did so . . . and at the same time, adjusted the surface area of its cells in that area to begin altering the gas mix surrounding the human.

  But the human posed a critical problem. It was at once so similar to Self on a chemical level . . . and yet it could not alter the simplest aspect of its environment or of its own chemistry. For the first time. Self considered the possibility that the human was, indeed, a not-Self organism separate from Self, but a relatively unintelligent one, an organism more like Rock than Self

  Self monitored the shifting balances of gasses dissolved within the human's unpleasantly electrolytic circulatory fluid and decided it would have to think about this further.

  "Lieutenant!" Lipinski was growing desperate. "We gotta get out of here! I tell you she ain't comin' back!"

  "Go on then, if you have to!" Hagan barked. "I'm staying!"

  "But the Hegleggers are going to be here any minute!"

  The two rebel warstriders stood side by side at the center of the crater, a few tens of meters from the black flow of the tunnel entrance. The brutalized landscape around them was barren, and at the moment completely deserted save for the two isolated warstriders. There was no other sign of life or movement: the last of the Xeno travel spheres had vanished on the winds hours before. The only movement at all was overhead, where Lara Anders's VK-141 Stormwind circled Red One. The stub-winged asc
raft had reappeared moments earlier, bearing word that the last of the Xenos had been stopped at the second defensive line, and that government troops and warstriders were on the way.

  "Let 'em come." Hagan replied. He gestured with his strider's autocannon, raising it as though in demonstration. "We're just more local militia, right?"

  "You guys might not want to hang around for too many hard questions though." Anders said over the comlink. "They might wonder where you were in the fighting."

  Her voice sounded terse, hard. Hagan remembered that Anders and Katya had always been close, ever since the ascraft jacker had started piloting strider drops for the Thorhammers back on Loki. She'd been shaken by the news that Katya had been missing now for almost three hours, but she was also a realist.

  "Vic," she called. "We've got to unplug and odie!"

  Odie . . . Inglic military slang from the Nihongo word for "dance," odori. It meant to leave in a hurry.

  But Hagan didn't want to leave. "Lara, you pick up Ski and head back to Emden. I'll stay . . . and mingle with the militia when they show up. Things're bound to be pretty confused after that fight. They won't notice me."

  "Lieutenant!" Lipinski sounded panicky. "She's been gone three goking hours!"

  "Face it. Vic." Lara's Stormwind was dropping now, angling toward the crater floor, her engines kicking up a small tornado of dust. "Katya's been dead for at least an hour!"

  "We don't know that." He tried to sound logical . . . rational. He knew he failed. "If she was able to make contact, they might have been able to take care of her life support needs. We know from Alya that they're wizards at analysis. Cameron talked about using a global-stage 'Phobe to terraform a whole planetary atmosphere! If she made her needs known, maybe—"