Dev thought the DalRiss definition of life a narrow one, but said nothing. Their definitions and their philosophies, like those for any sentient species, were bounded by the limitations of their senses.
The final seconds of an agreed-upon countdown ticked away, and the great DalRiss cityships flickered from existence. Aboard the Carl Friedrich Gauss, Kara, Katya, and Daren all were linked in, watching as the stars shifted, as they were replaced by twin dwarfs flaming against blackness, by spiraling ribbons of star stuff.
They watched with an awe that approached an almost holy reverence as they first caught sight of the impossible, mercury-bright thread of the Device suspended in space between the two.
And there was more. Space between the two suns appeared to be somewhat hazy, as though filled with a thin, slightly translucent mist. Within that mist there were… shapes, unknown shapes, shapes beyond the experience of humans, beyond the experience of any life form with perceptions rooted solidly in only three dimensions. The human observers followed line and form back into an infinity of distance, minds reeling as they tried to interpret what they were seeing.…
“All stations,” Vic’s voice announced over the network connecting all of the Confederation vessels in the fleet. “Phase One commencement… now.”
Like huge starfish improbably giving birth to offspring that bore them no resemblance whatsoever, the DalRiss carriers began releasing the starships tucked into their ventral folds. Human ships, from corvettes and packets to slush-H tankers and supply freighters to the huge, arrowhead shapes of the ryu carriers, spilled into space, spreading out ahead of the larger, Alyan vessels.
The Carl Friedrich Gauss slipped free of the embrace of its DalRiss, accelerating slightly to work its way clear of the cityship creature. Its hab modules began rotating slowly about its axis, though the humans linked into the comm net were unaware of either the absence or the presence of mundane conveniences like gravity.
Unmanned probes—Charlies, as the xenologists aboard were calling them—dropped clear of open cargo bays throughout the fleet and accelerated on tiny, flaring white suns. Some were military remote sensors, deployed to perceive and map a larger area of battle should a fight develop. Others were unarmed remotes, for the attempt at communicating with the Web, and for providing a closer look at the strangeness up ahead. Clearly, there’d been changes here in the short time since Dev had recorded the scene… engineering of some sort on a scale so vast human minds were having difficulty grasping it.
Two Charlies boosted away from the Gauss, jacked by Daren and Taki. As they approached the glowing, golden cloud of mist and the enigmatic shapes dimly glimpsed within, their voices came across the communications channel, uploaded to the entire Net.
“My God,” Daren said, his voice tight. “That mist… it’s machines. Devices of some kind. There must be billions of them.…”
“And they are responding to our presence,” Taki’s voice added. “We’re decelerating, to let them know we’re not hostile.”
“Kuso,” Kara added from her link within her Cutlass, still waiting for release from the research ship. “These guys just killed a few billion DalRiss, and we’re worried about hostile?”
“It still could be some kind of mistake,” Taki said. “Initiating transmission…”
The signal, broadcast on frequencies known to be used by the Web, was a repeating loop of good intentions and we-come-in-peace assurances, coupled with nested pleas for an open communications channel. The human watchers were all well aware, however, that Dev and the DalRiss had tried much the same thing in their encounter here.
So had the DalRiss and the human-crewed ships at Alya.
And then the waves of machine warcraft appeared, exploding out of empty space like glittering droplets flung glistening into the sunlight by an ocean breaker crashing over rocks. There was no response to the peace overture, no acknowledgement of signals, no attempt at communication.
And in the next few seconds, ships, DalRiss and human, began to die.…
Chapter 25
The human intellect is feeble, and there are times when it does not assert the infinity of its claims. But even then—
Though in black jest it bows and nods,
I know it is roaring at the Gods,
Waiting the last Eclipse.
—Daedalus, or Science and the Future
J. B. S. HALDANE
C.E. 1923
The first wave of Web machines accelerated to relativistic speeds, hurtling toward the Combined Fleet so quickly that they rode in close behind the light waves announcing their arrival. Taki, linked in with a remote approaching the Web well out ahead of the rest of the human and DalRiss ships, had only a blurred impression of something like a wall of glittering raindrops or ice crystals rushing toward her face at tremendous speed.
She screamed…
… and with a shuddering jolt, the sound of metal ringing on metal still sounding in her ears, she woke up aboard the Gauss, strapped into a couch within the dark, calm enclosure of a comm module.
For a moment she could only lie there, gasping like a fish stranded on the beach. The impression of actually being there, of actually being the probe itself as it was struck by hurtling chunks of metal, had been so realistic that it had been impossible to remind herself at the time that her body was safe aboard the research ship.
“Daren?” she called into the darkness, focusing on her Companion’s link.
“Oof,” she heard in her mind. “I just got ran over by about a million angry Webbers. You, too?”
“Yeah. But I’m going back.”
“Why? The Webbers aren’t interested in talking. That’s clear. Let the professionals worry about it.”
It was tempting. Taki had never known such fear as that instant when she’d seen the glittering wall descending on her. It would be a lot easier to jack into the Primary Net and just watch, along with all of the other humans in the fleet… and throughout the Shichiju as well.
Taki, however, didn’t like weakness, didn’t like admitting to weakness. She’d grown up on a world where most of the citizens assumed she was Imperial because of her eyes and her face and her name, but she’d forged ahead despite the obstacles and won her doctorate in xenology. Ten years ago, and despite the common belief that Japanese never dirtied themselves with alien parasites, she’d accepted a Companion. Her thinking at the time had been that she could adopt a Naga expression as a men, a way to simply and easily transform her face into that of a Caucasian, safe and acceptable, with free access into any part of New American society.
For over twenty hours she’d been a shiro, a white. She’d even recolored her glossy black hair yellow, becoming kimpatsu—the derogatory Nihongo slang for a blonde.
But it hadn’t been her, and she refused to live a lie. After one memorable standard as a shiro, she’d reverted to her natural phenotype, and to hell with anyone who didn’t like it.
She hadn’t hidden then, and she wasn’t about to hide now.
Swiftly, she reentered the control linkage and selected another Charlie, waiting in the racks in Gauss’s cargo bay. Darkness enveloped her, and then she was looking down into the star-strewn emptiness beneath the modified Cutlass. Words scrolled across her field of vision.
TELEPRESENCE LINK CONFIRMED
ELECTRONIC CHECKS OK
TANK PRESSURIZATION COMPLETE
PROBE 5 READY FOR LAUNCH
“Stay if you want to, Daren,” she said. She keyed the release command and dropped into night once again. “I’m damned if I’m going to hang around inside the ship waiting for things to happen!”
During her few moments off-line, the swarm of onrushing Web machines had reached the human-DalRiss fleet. In utter and magnificent silence—save for the wild calls of pilots and operators over the tactical nets—the battle unfolded in blossoming, searing brilliance. Explosions strobed as high-velocity chunks of metal slammed into duralloy plate, or as fusion warheads erupted in thermonuclear glory. Taki�
�s display view was a bewildering complexity of what was actually visible and the drifting, flickering graphics provided by her AI, identifying moving objects, warning of collisions, pointing out immediate threats. The sky was filled with wheeling, plunging human ships mingled with the strangely shaped probes and artifices of alien minds.
Ahead, the gold-glowing cloud shining about the thread-slender Device appeared to be slowly reshaping itself. Billions—no, trillions of separate Web machines were reorienting themselves according to some unguessable, private strategy.
Unable to join the battle, unable to understand more than a fraction of what she was seeing, Taki became a spectator adrift in the drama unfolding all about her.
The battle had already degenerated into a whirling, mad free-for-all, bewildering in its complexity and scope. The Web devices were scattered through space so thickly they formed a silvery gold mist, a sea of mechanisms, of machines in infinite panoply of design and purpose and function.
Kara’s Matic had long since been reconfigured as a war-flyer, with a ten-meter maneuvering module nanosealed to her hull and jacked into the control linkages. Inside her life pod, Kara floated in a thick liquid to protect her from the brutal accelerations of space combat, with nanotech umbilicals keeping her body alive, and a Companion-link hookup with the Gauss’s AI feed so that she could watch through the Combined Fleet’s Net link. She could see little detail in that cloud at first, and for the first few seconds she assumed she was seeing some sort of local atmosphere, an outgassing effect, possibly, channeled through the strange physics holding sway over the vicinity of the Device.
Naga-formed scouts and robot probes fired from the Combined fleet immediately upon reentry into normal space, however, swiftly penetrated the outer fringes of the cloud, relaying data and images back to the human-DalRiss fleet.
“My God in heaven!” someone in her squadron said over the link. “How are we going to stop that?”
“Cut the commentary,” she snapped back. “Status report!”
Numbers flickered past her awareness, each of the fifteen warflyers in her squadron reporting full readiness to launch. They were arrayed in release gantries in a bay already evacuated, poised above a yawning emptiness through which stars were wheeling. The warflyers were carried in a spin gravity cargo bay; when the magnetic clamps were released, the flyers would be flung clear of the Gauss by centrifugal force.
The nightmare of it all was that there was nothing fifteen warflyers could do against a storm of mind and metal like that swarming at that moment outside the Gauss’s bulkheads. Even entering the melee could be suicide, though it was hoped that the smaller flyers might attract less attention than the huge, lumbering behemoths of the ryu carriers. Certainly, in these first few seconds, the ryus had been attracting more than their fair share of attention from the enemy.
“All systems check,” Kara said, “operational and on-line. All flyers, First Squadron, report ready for launch.”
“Roger that, Phantom One,” the voice of Gauss’s flight control replied. “You are clear for launch.”
“Punch it!” Kara yelled over the link, and her Cutlass dropped into vacuum.
Vic watched the Web clouds closing on the human vessels and their DalRiss allies, and thought again of the analogy of antibodies attacking a pathogen or a foreign substance. The attack seemed just as automatic, just as mindless as the purely chemical reaction of antibody adhering to antigen, and he was beginning to think that the Web had no reaction at all to outsiders save that one instinctive and purely defensive response.
Radio, microwave, and laser messages were still being beamed at the Web mechanisms, with special attention being paid to the five or six Alpha-class planetoids that hovered like great, spherical shadows against the glow of golden mist, thousands of kilometers deeper into the Web-cloud. Each message was a plea for communication using channels and frequencies determined by Dev’s first contact with the Web, but none were answered or even acknowledged.
All that was left then was to fight… but it was swiftly becoming apparent that the human-DalRiss forces didn’t have the ghost of a chance in this conflict.
Typically, battles between opposing fleets of warships developed as a series of passes, the two fleets hurtling toward each other, maneuvering all the way to throw off the enemy’s fire and to set up the best possible angle for the fire control computers. As the fleets passed or even interpenetrated one another, AIs, with reflexes far quicker than those of humans, took over the targeting and firing tasks, loosing hundreds of volleys within the space of a few seconds.
This was not a typical space battle, however. The Combined Fleet had emerged with a fairly low velocity relative to the Device, while the guardian machines had been in extended orbits around it, with relative velocities of only a few kilometers per second. As the battle unfolded, the swarm of human and DalRiss vessels had drifted into the leading part of the Web cloud, decelerating, merging, until the individual members of both swarms were almost motionless relative to one another. In the human fleet, weapons fired until they were on the point of overheating, and AI monitors began threatening system shutdown.
The most effective human-built weapons appeared to be among the most old-fashioned—missiles with thermonuclear warheads. Missiles fired from every ship in the Combined Fleet streaked through that snowstorm of oncoming Web machines, accelerating into the heart of the glowing cloud. Some were intercepted and dismantled, literally torn apart before they could be triggered; most plunged into the Web array and detonated, however, eye-searing pinpoints of intense light expanding swiftly into sun-brilliant spheres of devouring plasma, each blast instantly annihilating thousands of machines in the densest part of the enemy fleet, then battering countless others into junk with the plasma shock wave or disabling them with the circuit-frying flash of an electromagnetic pulse.
The Imperium’s thermonuclear warheads were bigger and far more powerful than those of the Confederation, averaging ten or twenty megatons in their destructive yield. The Frontier worlds, when they’d been part of the Shichiju, had been forbidden to manufacture or even possess nuclear warheads, and their technology and nuke-assembly skills were not as up-to-date as those of the Imperials. Still, thermonuclear warheads were relatively simple to construct and virtually foolproof in their operation. Even a one-megaton blast, properly placed within the Web array, was enough to vaporize thousands of war machines. One of the Alphas took a close-spaced pair of nuclear warheads from the Constitution that turned half of its surface white-hot and molten. The artificial moonlet drifted free in space then, its drives silenced, the forest of antennae that had covered its surface melted away.
But a thousand nuclear detonations… a hundred thousand would not have more than inconvenienced that horde massed before the Combined Fleet. They would have to flee now, while they still could.
And pray that the Web wouldn’t pursue them.
Kara accelerated hard, then cut her drive and flipped end for end decelerating now with a long, shuddering burst of thrust from her drive. Web machines were everywhere, filling the sky, sailing past her hurtling warflyer, impacting across the hull of the Gauss. As she drifted low across the research vessel’s side, she could see the smallest of the Web machines already gathering in clumps within the angles and recesses of the hull metal like drifts of dirty gray snow.
More of the gossamer machine-things flashed past, their initial vectors given to them by beams of laser or microwave energy from the larger Web craft. They seemed to be without other means of propulsion, for the majority sailed harmlessly past the human vessels and into the interstellar deep. Those that struck, however, rapidly became motile on their own, scrunching along like handkerchief-sized amoebas, finding others of their own kind, merging into larger shapes… and larger… and larger.
Clearly, they were some type of nanotechnic weapon, similar in principle to human nanodisassembler gases, for where they gathered, pits and craters began opening up in duralloy armor plate as, lite
rally a molecule at a time, the attackers began taking the tough artificial substance apart.
That was why the larger ships in the Combined Fleet all carried squadrons of warflyers or were covered by squadrons off the ryu carriers. Kara slowed above a particularly large mass of crawling, oozing gray eating its way into the Gauss and opened fire with her laser. She experimented with the beam intensity as she swept it over the ship’s hull; she needed to find a setting that would cook the Web units without punching a hole through the science ship’s hull. One hundred to one hundred fifty megawatts seemed to be about right. Each burst seared the duralloy armor, scorching paint and peeling off external nano layers, but so long as she kept the beam moving it could not heat any one point enough to burn through.
The Web nano-D, however, designed to receive power from lower-powered lasers, could only handle that influx of energy for a few seconds before it began to curdle and boil. A few seconds more, and the stuff exploded into vapor, all cohesion between its molecule-sized working parts lost.
It was like bailing an ocean with a teacup, however. As fast as Kara burned the snowdrifts into vapor, more of the infalling nanotechnic weapons landed. Some were collecting on her warflyer as she worked, and twice she had to call for help from someone else in the squadron to burn them off before they ate through to some vital piece of Kara’s Matic’s internal structure.
At least they were slowing the destruction of the Gauss.
A little. She hoped.…
Dev rode the Net, watching the battle with a curiously detached, almost casual lack of emotion. The Web vehicles appeared to be concentrating their heaviest firepower on the largest Combined Fleet ships. Hiryu, slightly ahead of the dome-shaped formation of Imperial carriers, had almost immediately become the focus for a barrage of dozens of energy beams.
One of the big Web Alphas had maneuvered to within a scant thousand kilometers of the Hiryu. Something like an enormous circular hatchway irised open on the hemisphere facing the Imperial carrier, revealing a blue-glowing cavern within. A moment later, and the cavern lit up with a dazzling blue-white glare, the energy spilling over into the ultraviolet wavelengths.
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