by Ian Douglas
But across the Galaxy, world after world showed the silent ruins marking the passing of sentient species akin to Humans, in terms of environmental preference and carbon chemistry if not outward form, all blasted into premature extinction by the xenophobic Xul.
Now, however, some twelve hundred years after the final defeat of the Xul at the Galactic Core, hundreds of nonhuman species had been discovered and contacted to one degree or another. Many had joined the original Terran Commonwealth in a kind of Galactic United Nations—the Associative.
Many of the more recently discovered species, however, were so alien that they shared little common ground with humans. Communications were difficult, even impossible, with species that communicated by smell or by changing patterns on their integuments or through subtle modulations of their bodies’ electrical fields, with beings that didn’t understand the concept of union, or with entities that thought so slowly they didn’t even appear to be aware of more ephemeral species flitting in and out about them.
Garroway’s curiosity was piqued as new memories surfaced of strange cultures and alien biologies. He tried querying the data base, hoping to get imagery of some of these beings…then realized his curiosity would have to wait until his implant had grown in fully. He didn’t have that capability yet.
His military training noticed one important difference between the Associative and the old Commonwealth. There no longer was such a thing as “human space”…or borders between stellar nations. While there were interstellar empires out there, few individual species competed for the same type of real estate, and the “territories” of dozens of different species overlapped. It had been centuries before the Nathga were discovered adrift within the atmospheres of gas giants inside star systems already colonized by humans. The concept of distinct borders had been lost over half a millennium ago.
How, Garroway wondered, did governments control their own volumes of space? Did they even try…and what changes did that mean for military strategy? For that matter, if there was little or no competition between governments, why was there a need for the military at all?
And why was there still such a thing as the Marine Corps?
Surprisingly, he found himself little impressed with the purely technological advances of the past eight hundred years. Most of what he was seeing as new memories continued to surface were further developments of old themes. Interstellar travel still required a mix of the Alcubierre Drive and the huge stargates left behind by a vanished, Galaxy-spanning culture. Quantum power taps, much smaller than the ones Garroway had known, still provided the vast quantities of energy necessary for FTL travel. Nanotechnology had continued its inexorable advance toward the ever-smaller, ever-smarter. Perhaps the most notable technological advances had come in the fields of health and medicine. Some of what he was seeing now he didn’t begin to understand. What the hell was mindkeeping, anyway? Or upload therapy?…
The Xul threat, he noted, had not entirely vanished after the climactic battle at the Galaxy’s core two decades before he’d been born. Xul nodes—local networks and fleet centers where they’d kept watch over the Galaxy for developing technic cultures—continued to be discovered from time to time, and had to be eliminated one by one. However, thanks to data retrieved from the Galactic center, Xul codes, software, and upload technology all were now well-enough understood that the ongoing mop-up had been turned over to AI assault units. Unmanned probes mimicking Xul hunterships would approach a target system and infect the local node with nanotech devices allowing the assault unit to literally reprogram the local Xul reality. When incoming data suggested that there was a threat that needed to be eliminated, the Xul virtual reality was simply rewritten on the fly to prove that the threat had already been eliminated.
And so far, the technique appeared to be working. There’d been no new Xul incursions in eight hundred years, and hundreds of Xul bases had subsequently been infiltrated and shut down from within. No new Xul nodes had been discovered in over two centuries, and most people thought that the last of the monsters had been found and destroyed.
Garroway knew better than to get too excited about that. The Galaxy was an extraordinarily huge place, and more Xul nodes could be—almost certainly were—still out there, lost somewhere within that vastness of four hundred billion suns.
How’s it going, General? Schillng’s voice said, overriding the torrent of memories.
Okay, I guess, he replied. Damn, there’s a hell of a lot….
He felt her mental smile. A lot can happen in eight hundred fifty years, in a collective culture that numbers in the hundreds of trillions of entities. Do you have any questions?
Not yet. I don’t know enough to know what to ask.
Okay. I’ve got a new download here. This one is mission specific. See what you think.
A moment later, Garroway came up for air. “Oh, gods,” was all he could say.
The Xul he’d known had possessed one striking weakness. Different nodes were slow to share data, and individual nodes could be slow—centuries, sometimes—in responding to a perceived threat. They also didn’t change. Tactics that had worked for millennia were not discarded, not changed, when opponents learned how they worked. It was one of the very few advantages Humankind had enjoyed in the long conflict, and the Marines had used it to their tactical advantage time after time.
According to this new download, though, the very worst had happened.
At long last, the Xul were adapting to the new situation with radically new tactics.
Hassetas, Dac IV
Star System 1727459
1850 hours, GMT
Garwe’s RS/A-91 Starwraith strikepod was more than a space-capable fighter, and more than Marine combat armor. Just two meters long, it was just large enough inside to accommodate a single Marine in coffin-like closeness, packed in acceleration gel and hardwired into the unit’s AI hardware. It was shaped like an elongated egg, with smooth-flowing bulges and swellings housing drive components and weaponry. Each was powered by a tiny quantum power tap, and used base-state repulsor agrav both for propulsion and to allow the craft to hover in place. They could not travel faster than light—Alcubierre Drive technology still required far more power than a ten-kilo QPT could provide—but they had virtually unlimited range and endurance. In one celebrated instance, a piece of Marine lore, a Marine named Micuel Consales had been stranded in a hostile star system by the destruction of the Marine combat carrier Vladivostok. He’d programmed the capsule to put him into deep cybe-hibe and accelerate to near-light velocity. The pod had been retrieved ninety-eight years later as it approached the nearest friendly base, and Consales had successfully been revived.
That had been nearly four hundred years earlier, and the technology had improved since then. A strikepod couldn’t go up against a capital ship, but it was fast, maneuverable, and damned hard to track, which made it a key component in the modern Marine arsenal. They could also be handled remotely, in certain circumstances, which could be a real advantage.
At the moment, Garwe and fifteen other Marines, each wearing an RS/A-91 strikepod, were approaching the Hassetas floatreef, which filled the sky ahead of them.
One of the genuine shocks of galactic exploration had been the discovery that even gas giants like Sol’s Jupiter could harbor life. True, in an atmosphere that was mostly hydrogen, with no solid surface, with fierce electromagnetic radiation belts, and with wind speeds that could approach six or seven hundred kilometers per hour, that life was going to be radically different from anything humans were familiar with.
But being different had kept them undiscovered by the Xul and other predators.
Dac IV’s native civilization had arisen from a close symbiosis between two evolving life forms—the Krysni and the Reefs.
The Reef was a vast bubble of tough but extremely light tissue, thirty kilometers or more across, and from a distance appearing as insubstantial as a soap bubble. Hanging below like rain shadow beneath a thunderhead was the living
part of the Reef, a kind of aerial jungle growing on and within the tangled mass of tentacles trailing beneath the main gas bag. Exothermic chemistries heated the hydrogen within the gas bag, providing lift; hydrogen jets provided some directional movement, enough, at any rate, to let the vast creature steer clear of downdrafts that would drag it into the ferociously hot, high-pressure depths of the atmosphere.
Within the floatreef’s remote evolutionary past, the tentacles would have evolved to capture smaller, more maneuverable fliers passing through the reef’s shadow. Now, they were an immense and inverted forest providing habitats for tens of thousands of species. Hanging among the thicker tentacles were feeder nets, sheets of closely woven tentacle-threads that filtered organic material out of the atmosphere. Modern floatreefs were skygrazers, inhaling clouds of sulfur-and zphosphorus-rich, locust-sized drifters called irm, the Dac equivalent of plankton or krill in distant Earth’s oceans.
It was an evolutionary panorama relatively common throughout the Galaxy. A majority of Jovian-type gas giants possessed life, it had turned out, and the environmental constraints required that life to follow more or less similar patterns of form and function. The ten-kilometer montgolfiers of Jupiter had first been discovered late in the twenty-fourth century.
Far more rarely, gas giant ecosystems evolved intelligence. In Jupiter and most other gas giants, intelligence was an unnecessary luxury; grazers didn’t need much in the way of brains to inhale clouds of drifting organics. But in Dac and a few hundred other gas giants discovered so far across the Galaxy, competition, the need to anticipate and avoid storms and downdrafts, and the elusive nature of local food animals had led to sentience at least as great as that of the extinct great whales of old Earth, and often to minds considerably greater and more powerful.
In Dac, according to the mission briefing downloads, there were at least two intelligent species living in close symbiosis—the floatreefs themselves and the Krysni.
Lieutenant Marek Garwe hovered vertically now in his Starwraith, half a meter above the deck of the Hassetas visitor tree house. The platform, constructed entirely of materials imported from distant, more solid worlds, was a good two hundred meters across, anchored against one of the major trunk-tentacles, three-quarters shrouded by the tentacle forest, and including a ramshackle assortment of buildings designed to accommodate each of seven or eight major biochemistries. Officially, the tree house was the offworlder compound, the reception center and living quarters for official delegations from other worlds to Dac. Currently, there were 224 visitors to the gas giant, including 57 humans of various species. The offworlders included Associative representatives, cultural liaisons, xenosophontologists and other scientific researchers, and formal diplomats.
Facing the twelve Marine wraiths were some tens of thousands of angry Krysni. Exactly what they were angry about had yet to be established. The call from the Dac offworlder compound, though, had been urgent, almost panicky. Four offworlders, all of them humans, had been killed by a sudden rising among the Krysni, and the remainder were terrified that the same was about to happen to them. Anchor Marine Strike Squadron 340 had been deployed from Laridis, some three hundred light years distant, to Tromendet in the Dac IV satellite system two days before. As the situation in the gas giant’s upper atmosphere deteriorated, the War Dogs had been ordered in.
The Marines floated above the compound deck, now, facing the tentacle jungle, a near-solid wall of intertwining tubules ranging in size from main trunks nearly a hundred meters thick to slender threads, writhing and twisting in a constant background of motion. Within the net of tentacles were masses of Dacan—or, more properly, Hassetan—flora: pinkweed, Dacleaf, methane bloom, gas pods, and myriad others, most either orange or purple in color, with smaller amounts of pink and red. And it was within this wall of mottled and rustling vegetation that the Krysni mob had sequestered itself, shrieking in their piping, hydrogen-thin keenings and whistlings, the calls a cacophony of furious invective and hate. What the hell, Garwe wondered, had gotten into the simpleminded creatures?
“Hold your fire,” Captain Xander ordered. “Let’s see if they’ll talk to us.”
“I don’t know, Skipper,” Lieutenant Palin, Blue Five, said. “They don’t look very friendly.”
A single Krysni looked a bit like a terrestrial octopus about a meter long, but with a body that expanded or contracted at will like a variable-pressure balloon. Like their huge cosymbiote, the floatreef, they were balloonists, suspended from organic sacs of body-heated hydrogen that let them drift in the upper Dacan atmosphere, their three large, black eyes and cluster of feeding, sensory, and manipulative tentacles dangling below.
Garwe and the other Marines of Blue Flight had downloaded complete work-ups on the Krysni and the floatreefs, of course, as soon as they’d received their mission orders. One line of reasoning held that the Krysni were juvenile floatreefs, but few modern xenosophontologists accepted the notion. There were billions of Krysni, none more than a meter to a meter and a half in length, and perhaps twelve thousand floatreefs scattered through the vastnesses of the upper Dacan atmosphere, none less than ten kilometers across. If the one grew into the other, there ought to be a few intermediate sizes as well.
The likeliest theory was that the two were related but separate species, and that they existed in a close symbiosis. The floatreef took its name from terrestrial coral reefs, not because it looked like one, but because, like a marine reef, it provided a unique and stable habitat for a vast and complex ecology living within and around it. The reef provided food and shelter for the vulnerable Krysni, while the Krysni herded and cultivated the complex zoo of Dacan life within the floatreef’s inverted forest, protecting their vast and sapient habitat from attack like sentient white blood cells. While the Krysni could float free, their preferred habitat was within the forest, their float bags flaccid as they used their tentacles to move through the tangle of vegetation and living branches of the undereef.
“This is Captain Xander, Associative Marine Force,” the squadron CO said over the local Net frequency for the compound. “Who’s in charge here?”
“I don’t think any of us is in charge, exactly…” a voice replied.
“Then you are, now,” Xander replied. “Who are you?”
“Vasek Trolischet,” the voice said. “I’m the senior xenosoph here.”
Blocks of data came up in a window within Garwe’s mind, streaming through from the compound’s data base. There was a vid, too, of a bald, dark-skinned human male with dazzling golden eyes. No, Garwe corrected himself. Not completely human, but a genegineered subspecies, an s-Human, Homo sapiens superioris. And apparently she was female.
Shit, a supie, one of the Marines broadcast on the squadron backchannel. Just fucking great.
“What happened here?” Xander asked the compound spokesperson.
“I don’t know.” The supie’s words were clipped, tight, and rapid-fire, as though her time sense had been jacked into overdrive. “The baggies just went crazy! Attacked our research team while they were trying to get language samples, and tossed two of them over the edge! Then a whole mob swarmed in and got two more of our security team before anyone knew what was going on!”
“There had to be a reason,” Xander said, deliberately transmitting at a slower pace. “Do you have a translation frequency?”
“Yes, but their attempts at communication are still quite scrambled. Our heuristic algorithms are necessarily incomplete.”
Garwe had to pull a definition for “heuristic” from his implant AI, and even then wasn’t sure he understood how the person was using the word. The damned supies enjoyed talking above the heads of others, especially norms, and scuttlebutt around the barracks had it that they liked flaunting their so-called superiority.
An astronomical IQ hadn’t stopped this one from getting into bad trouble, though. The Krysnis were beginning to advance over the tree house deck, inflating their bodies to taut, pale-blue bubbles over a meter across
and drifting slowly toward the Marine line.
“Hold your fire,” Xander repeated. “I don’t think they’re armed.”
“They have lots of arms, Skipper,” Lieutenant Malleta said, the nervousness in his voice at odds with the attempt at a joke. There were hundreds of the creatures in a mass in front of the Marines, now, their inflated bodies bumping and jostling with one another as they drifted forward.
“Halt!” Xander barked, speaking Standard, but the transmission translated to a sharp chirp by the translation algorithm from the compound. It sounded, Garwe thought, like the unpleasant squeak of a couple of rubber balloons rubbed together.
“Hey, Captain?” Lieutenant Bollan asked. “Those things are full of hydrogen, right? If we shoot ’em—”
“Use your head, Bollan,” Xander replied. “There’s no oxygen in the air to burn. No fire. No hydrogen explosion, okay?”
“Oh, yeah. Right.”
Garwe had been thinking about that unpleasant possibility as well, and was able to relax a bit. The captain was right. Shoot one of those gas bags with an electron arc and the thing might pop, but it wouldn’t go up in flames. The entire ecosystem within this world’s atmosphere relied on metabolic processes that took in methane and ammonia, metabolized them for carbon and the nitrogen, and gave off hydrogen. Oxygen was present, but only as a part of trace chemical compounds like water vapor, carbon dioxide, or sulfuric or nitric acids. Fires needed free oxygen to burn, and that just wasn’t going to happen in the reducing atmosphere of a gas giant.
The mass of Krysni continued to drift forward. “Shoot them, Xander!” the s-Human was shouting over the link. “Shoot the little gasbag smuggers!”
An indicator light went on in Garwe’s in-head display, indicating that Lieutenant Sanders was charging his primary weapon; a thought would trigger it. “Belay that, Sanders!” Xander snapped. “All of you! Primaries on safe!”
