Netlink

by William H. Keith

They fought back. The Naga fragment serving as nervous system for each of the huge living cityships had a small asteroid at its core to draw on—the source of the raw materials it used for its own growth, and for the growth and repair of its hosts. Slits opened up between the starfish arms; lumps of asteroidal rock, manipulated by intense magnetic fields, streaked across space with the unerring accuracy of an organic Naga computer, and the oncoming machine ships began dying one after another in spectacular miniature novae.

  But at odds of a million to one…

  Sirghal had taken a dozen serious hits; a cloud of living machines, most gossamer-thin wisps driven by laser light, fell onto the DalRiss creature’s surface like the whirling snow-flakes of a wind-whipped blizzard, coating the ship-creature’s outer hide in layer upon layer of gray-white matter, molecule-sized machines that changed their order and their actions so quickly they defied analysis.

  They were eating the ship’s outer hull, literally disassembling it bite by microscopic bite.…

  The DalRiss hurled lumps of asteroidal material at the larger targets, destroying hundreds, even thousands… but there were too many of them for the entire DalRiss fleet to even make a dent in those oncoming hordes, and they had no weapons at all useful against the sticky, disassembling masses of programmed, molecule-sized machines that were beginning to coat each of the living ships. The battle, if that’s what such a one-sided slaughter could be called, lasted for all of three or four seconds, and then, one by one… then in fives and tens, the cityships began flickering from view, shifting out and away, vanishing as their Achievers put forth their wills and their lives and transported their charges across space.

  »DEVCAMERON« felt the Sirghal gathering its organic energies. There was a lurching sensation, a whirling moment of confused impressions.…

  They were alone, in a different point in space.

  “Where are we?” »DEVCAMERON« asked.

  “Someplace else.”

  The white dwarfs and the Device were gone. In their place, a nebula unfolded transparent wings of blue and red and white across Heaven.

  And the battle wasn’t over yet, for the machine gossamer-things still clung to parts of Sirghal’s surface, dismantling it like nanodisassemblers. Fortunately, with no other attackers to distract them, the DalRiss aboard could deal with the drifts of deadly molecules. The Naga fragment at the ship’s core extruded a portion of itself, flowing out and over the cityship’s surface, engulfing and absorbing the plague like an amoebic antibody devouring a mass of pathogenic bacteria.

  By patterning the information recorded in those scraps of biomechanical matter, the Naga was able to add a bit more to the stores of data already being compiled on the Web… but not very much. The gossamer projectiles had known little, save their basic programming to coat and dismantle and destroy. Still, they possessed some identity. They were the Web.

  As was everything else in the universe.

  Shaken by the attack, shaken more by the emotion-laden images from his alter-self that he was still trying to assimilate and reconcile, »DEVCAMERON« struggled to understand the alien viewpoint. At its core, he thought, was a strangely shifted perception of self.

  That concept of self interested »DEVCAMERON«, for it was a concept at the heart of the alien worldview of the Naga as well. Where the Naga held a sharply binary distinction of self and not-self, however, the Web perceived itself not as a part of the cosmos, but as the cosmos in its entirety. Everything, from the assembled multitude of other machines all working together in an invisible latticework of communications to the farthest, most distant star in the heavens, was a part of self.

  Some parts of self, evidently, were less communicative or pliable or receptive to central direction than others, however, and had to be integrated—reintegrated, rather—into the whole.

  It was, »DEVCAMERON« thought, an astonishingly egocentric viewpoint.

  “What should we do now?” he asked the DalRiss around him. “Where is the rest of the fleet?”

  “We had no prepared rendezvous,” was the answer, and »DEVCAMERON« felt an icy chill of dismay as he heard it. “We assumed that it would always be possible to coordinate the activities of our Achievers. Unfortunately, there was no time. Each of the cityships must have chosen a unique destination, as did Sirghal.”

  “Then… the fleet must be scattered across… what? How great a distance?”

  “We estimate that we are now some nine hundred light years from the Device. The others would have jumped similar distances, but in similarly random directions.”

  “Then the fleet is scattered across a volume of space almost two thousand light years across.” He thought about that a moment, and about what he knew of DalRiss psychology. He doubted that the individual cityships would continue their explorations separately. All would want to regroup, if for no other reason than to assemble and coordinate what they’d learned in the brief battle at the Stargate.

  And Dev Cameron needed to talk again to humans.

  The shift in his perception of himself was startling. He was no longer »DEVCAMERON«, the human-Naga-DalRiss hybrid of patterned memories and intricately self-programming self-awareness that had existed for decades in symbiosis with the DalRiss-Naga union of the cityship Sirghal, but Dev Cameron… a mind adrift in an alien body, but distinctly and uniquely himself. What was the difference? He wasn’t certain, though he thought the key was the odd split in perceptions of himself and his attitudes engendered by the duplication of himself before the probing of the Stargate.

  His self-copy had not liked what it had seen of its original. Reassimilated, the copy did not fit as it should have. Attitudes had changed. Awareness of itself and its goals and its interpretation of its own memories had changed. This almost-duplicate continued to exist as a part of Dev’s being, an uncomfortable near-fit that jarred and jangled, like a squeal of feedback over an improperly adjusted sound system.

  Coming to terms with himself would have to wait, however. More important was the Web’s perception of self, which, Dev was increasingly certain, could be a serious danger not only to the DalRiss fleet, but to the sphere of human-colonized space as well. The Web must have first evolved eons ago at or near the Galactic Core, but for eons they’d been spreading from world to world, from system to system, going farther and farther afield both in space and—astonishment!—in time. As he studied the Web’s perception of its surroundings, he realized that time meant far less to the machines than it did to organic life not because they were virtually immortal, but because the Stargates were gateways through time as well as space.

  Realization chilled… and brought a sharp stab of wonder with it. That odd clustering of novae in one small portion of the sky within a single forty-year period noted by human astronomers early in the twentieth century.…

  Swiftly, Dev downloaded all of the data he had access to on novae, with particular emphasis on their distances from Earth and on when they’d been recorded on Earth. The individual novas were scattered across an incredibly vast area of space. Nova Aquila was twelve hundred light years away and had exploded in about C.E. 700 for its light to reach Earth in 1918; another fast, bright nova in the same general part of the sky was Nova Cygni, which had shone in Earth’s skies in 1920 and was about four thousand light years distant. An odd recurrent nova, WZ Sagitta, had erupted first in 1913 and then again several times after that, and was three hundred light years from Earth. There were dozens of other examples. The clustering in space was odd, of course, but the clustering in time was odder still. Working backward, those three novae had actually exploded in about C.E. 1600, C.E. 700, and B.C.E. 3000… and yet the outward expanding shells of light marking their detonations had all reached Earth within the same seven-year period.

  Swiftly, he studied record after record. Clearly, the Web was working in time as well as in space, detonating stars in such a way that, despite their separations in space, the light of the various explosions was merging, traveling outward together in a vast sh
ell expanding at the speed of light.

  The shift in perspective required by this realization staggered Dev. His first thought, that there was something special about Earth’s position, he discarded almost at once. Superficially, it might appear that those stars, if destroyed deliberately, had been exploded at varying times across varying distances so that their light signatures, their funeral pyres, would all reach Earth at roughly the same time, but Dev was seeing the information now in a new and grander perspective. Earth, or its location, had nothing to do with the timing of those novae; what had been coordinate was the placement of the expanding shells of light radiation.

  Seen from a distance of some tens of thousands of light years, those expanding wavefronts of light might resemble a number of nested bubbles… a structure, in fact, vast beyond belief, constructed entirely of photons.

  Dev had absolutely no idea why such a thing would be constructed, or what purpose it could possibly serve. Unlike the rare supernovae, which could briefly outshine all of the other stars of their galaxy combined, novae were not especially brilliant when seen from a great distance away. Nova Aquila, when it exploded almost two thousand years ago, had briefly shone over 400,000 times more brilliantly than Earth’s sun; at its brightest, it had been brighter than every other star in Earth’s sky except Sirius… bright, certainly, and unusual for its extreme change in brightness, but in practical terms it was simply another point of light in the sky.

  What could the purpose of these nested bubbles, expanding out through the Galaxy at the speed of light, possibly be?

  Study it closer. What are you seeing?

  The merging of bubbles would be different along different axes of the multiple shells’ propagations, of course. There was still a coincidence, somehow, in the fact that so many wave-fronts of exploding stars should be jammed up together as seen from Earth; viewed from a different direction, they would not reinforce one another that way.

  Reinforcement? The word triggered a new idea.

  Certain novae seen from Earth seemed to nest together that way in space and in time; as he added the records of more and more novae to his calculations, however, Dev saw that there were in reality many axes extending in different directions through the galaxy, their shapes defined by expanding, closely nested bubbles of light. You had to be selective in what you were looking at to see the patterns; where the waves piled up together in space and in time—such as the peculiar alignment of novae seen from Earth in the early twentieth century—there was a kind of reinforcement, like the lock-step march of wavelengths in a laser; elsewhere, expanding bubbles intersected rather than reinforced, causing rippling patterns of interference.…

  Interference patterns, like those in some titanic holographic record. Now there was an idea.…

  There was no time to think more about it, however. One of the DalRiss, linked to a Perceiver, announced the appearance of yet more machines, some ten light minutes away.

  The distance was illuminating. If the light of their arrival was reaching the Sirghal only now, they must have materialized in this part of space ten minutes ago… or within a minute or so of Sirghal’s escape and arrival. Somehow, the Web had tracked them across almost a thousand light years of space.

  He couldn’t imagine how. He didn’t think they used K-T space, the way human stardrives did, nor did they seem to use the same space-folding techniques employed by the DalRiss. He’d assumed they needed the Stargate to open gravitationally warped pathways or wormholes across the light years—past them, rather—but as he watched, machine upon malevolent space-faring machine was appearing out of empty space.

  They could have been projected there by the Stargate, he realized. Possibly, they were using it as a kind of one-way slingshot, hurling these vessels after the fugitive DalRiss. That implied a staggering control of space and time, to be able to launch a pursuit fleet across nine hundred light years and be accurate in targeting to within ten light minutes.…

  More horrifying still was the determination behind that feat. If it was true they could only cross distances of light years by using the Device as a kind of one-way launcher, this new wave of machine-vessels was in fact here on a suicide mission, with the expectation that none of its members would ever be able to return.

  “Quick!” Dev thought to those minds watching with his. “We must jump again!”

  “We need time to orient our Achievers. Another random jump could lose us among the stars forever.”

  “Nor is there assurance that we could escape,” another voice said. “If they could track us once, perhaps they can track us through unlimited transitions.”

  “We can’t fight them,” Dev said. Already, the Web machines numbered in the tens of thousands, and all were accelerating rapidly toward the Sirghal. Was the same thing happening to the other DalRiss survivors at this moment, scattered all across this part of the Galaxy? “Our only hope is to jump, and keep on jumping until we lose them.”

  “And then?”

  “And then,” Dev continued with a determination born of dawning fear and horror at the scope of this threat, “then—after we’re very sure that we’ve lost them—we must return to human space. I think they need to know what we’ve found out here.”

  “I hope it is possible to lose them,” a DalRiss voice said doubtfully. “To have followed us this far implies a staggering level of technological achievement, either in calculation, or in the ability to track or observe across vast distances.”

  “Agreed. But I’m inclined to believe that they need the Device to send their machines across light years.” He watched the horde gathering for a moment. “If we don’t move fast, though, they won’t have to track us, will they?”

  Before the horde reached them, then, Sirghal vanished, losing itself among the stars.

  It would be a long time before the DalRiss found themselves once more.

  Chapter 11

  The unresting progress of mankind causes continual change in the weapons; and with that must come a continual change in the manner of fighting.

  —The Influence of Seapower upon History

  ALFRED THAYER MAHAN

  C.E. 1830

  Kara stood in the fresher, one hand lightly touching once again the unfamiliar outlines of her face, an unconscious reassurance that her jissai no men, her “reality’s face,” was still in place. It was still hard to believe that that was her.

  Since only Japanese were permitted on Mars, Kara had assumed a Japanese persona. Her Naga, with the same mutability that allowed it to mold bone and tissue into electronic sockets and other hardware, or transform her skin into psychedelic colors, lights, and patterns, had literally reshaped her face, right down to the fine structure of the bone itself. A painful process, that, except that her Companion could control input from her nervous system during the reworking of her features and filter out the pain. But it did leave her face feeling… strange, unfamiliar, and even after three weeks it was still a shock when she looked in a mirror.

  Her face now literally was a men, both face and mask, as well as her passport to a forbidden world.

  Only Nihonjin—people of Japanese ancestry—were allowed to set foot on the world now called Kasei. Even in synchorbit the activities of visiting gaijin businessmen were carefully supervised. This restriction extended even to non-Japanese citizens of Dai Nihon—Greater Japan—those citizens of Singapore, the Philippines, Vancouver, and the other Earthside outposts of the Empire that were Japanese in name, but not in ancestry. To walk the sands of Kasei, you had to trace your ancestry back to the Home Islands.

  Which was why Kara was traveling in disguise. She’d first taken a commercial liner from New America to Eridu, a voyage of thirty-six light years and some five weeks. There, she’d taken passage aboard the Imperial liner Teikoku for the three-week passage to Sol. She’d been traveling aboard one ship or another for two months now, but she was finally at her destination. An hour before, she’d checked into the Sorano Hoteru, Aresynch’s largest hotel. Spin gravi
ty here was set to about one-third G, the same as that on the Martian surface.

  Sergeant Vasily Lechenko was here too, along with three other volunteers from the Phantoms’ 1/1. The way she’d heard it, he’d point-blank refused to step back even when the CMI personnel in charge of ops preparation had pointed out that his 193-centimeter, 104-kilo mass was not the norm for the Japanese phenotype.

  Kara was glad the big sergeant was so stubborn. He made an impressive-looking Japanese businessman, all hard muscle beneath his Naga-reshaped facial features and a tan and white Sony business uniform. He and his men would be her security backup as she penetrated the Kasei Net, and they would be her one chance of getting out of this place again when she was done.

  Security at Aresynch was tight, and smuggling weapons in had been a problem. She took a final look around the fresher, as she’d already checked her room, paying special attention to the nooks and crannies of the room’s small fresher closet, sink, and toilet. Had the Naga residing within her detected the carrier wave of a hidden transmitter, it would have silently and inwardly alerted her. But there was nothing save the normal radio traffic that could be expected in a building such as this.

  There were, of course, no guarantees. A television pickup constructed through molecular nanotechnics could be the size of the head of a pin, and listening devices were smaller still. Her one hope of security lay in the fact that too many people passed through this station every day for Imperial Security to bother tracking them all.

  In the fresher, she stood in front of the sink, removing a small can of hair spray, a travel hair dryer, a solid gold brooch, and a pocket TV-computer from her toiletries case and laying them out on the counter. All of the articles worked as advertised and, indeed, the hair dryer, brooch, and the TV were exactly what they seemed to be.

  The hair spray was something more. With pressure from her thumb and a deft twist, she popped the can’s base off; inside, tucked into a small recess, was a wad of pale gray clay just a little larger than her thumbnail. Placing the clay on the counter next to the opened can and the other items, she wet her finger under the tap, then transferred a few drops of water to the substance.