Warstrider 06 - Battlemind

by William H. Keith

  “You are no less than you were as an organic creature,” Sholai said. “And to our way of thinking, you are consid­erably more.”

  “Because I have instant communications access to others of my own kind?” Dev asked.

  “Exactly.”

  “The trouble is finding others of my own kind,” Dev said. “Humans, real humans, have their physical lives to fall back on. I have nothing but this. Artificial Intelligences are conscious, intelligent beings only within certain rather narrow parameters, like steering starships or creating virtual worlds. I’m… alone.”

  “All living creatures are alone,” the DalRiss said. “Ex­cept insofar as they all are part of the Great Dance of life everlasting.”

  “There is no such thing as ‘alone,’ ” the Gr’tak said. “So long as we find community in Mind.”

  Dev was curious. Sholai and a number of other Gr’tak had come along with the GEF. The DalRiss cityship Shral­ghal had grown a special compartment for them somewhere within its cavernous depths, where air and humidity and temperature could be matched to their preferences more con­veniently than aboard a human starship. But they’d done so at a cost, cutting themselves off from the rest of their kind, who’d been left behind in the twenty-sixth century.

  “Sholai?”

  “Yes?”

  “Why did you come along on this goose chase, Sholai?”

  “Goose… chase?”

  “Um… a possibly futile pursuit.”

  “Ah. Our artificials are still having some difficulty with Anglic slang and idiom.” He hesitated. “We come partly to participate in this plan to destroy the Web.” There was coldness there. “They have much to answer for, this rogue associative called the Web. For your people, for the DalRiss, for us. We are here, too, because you are now our Associ­ative. We wish to… share in your collective experience.”

  “I hope you’re not disappointed,” Dev said.

  He turned away, then, focusing his attention not on the Gate, but the sensory readings that measured the local cur­vature of space. That wildly spinning, whirling mass had stretched space and time both to the breaking point. He could sense, he could see with something beyond vision, how the angle of their approach was sending them into one of the predicted myriad openings that would bypass space. Astern, the battle between Imperial and Confederation forces was speeding up, until the pinpoints of light that marked the different ships, the flashes of explosions as mis­siles connected, were darting and flickering like the images on a ViRdrama being presented at dozens of times faster than normal. Time, here in the gravitationally twisted fields about the Gate, was running more slowly; One-GEF was already moving into the future. Dev hoped that everyone who’d wanted off the GEF ships had been able to transfer elsewhere. There was no going back now, not until and un­less they’d achieved complete success.

  Then the warring fleets astern vanished, and the stars themselves were crawling slowly across the sky, their wave­lengths wildly redshifted by the GEF’s fall until they, too, vanished in Night Absolute. For long moments, there was only the Gate, looming huge now, just ahead, a wall that filled half of the heavens. Then, the silvery shape blurred. Light bouncing from its sides and reflected toward the fleet was being distorted.

  Distortion became blackness, an impenetrable night.

  In the last instant, Dev had the impression that they were falling into a long and utterly death-black tunnel.

  Linked into Gauss’s main navigation system, Kara watched as the line of three DalRiss cityships—starfish-shapes each the size of a mountain, their tapering arms curled protectively around the frail, human-built vessels tucked away in their ventral grooves—moved in perfect line-ahead formation, following the path that would take them across eighteen hundred light years in space and nearly a thousand years forward in time. The DalRiss had never developed the fine navigational control that humans employed routinely on their vessels. For that reason, human navigators, jacked into the DalRiss computers through their Naga Companions, were steering the huge cityships, following computer graphic simulations that kept them on the correct approach path. In Kara’s mind, the ordinarily invisible path had been painted as a blue-walled tunnel, with the seething flux of blue light to left and right, above and below representing the tortured space that existed within a few hundred meters of the continent-sized spinning cylinder.

  Kara, like Dev, felt a heaviness unlike any she’d known before. It always hurt when comrades were killed or wounded, but Ran Ferris haunted her. Though she’d never let herself closely examine her feelings for him—company COs, she was convinced, didn’t have time for romantic li­aisons—she knew now that she loved him, and his loss… no, the uncertainty, the not knowing whether she’d lost him forever or not… was tearing her apart.

  Damn the war. Her thoughts were a hard, staccato litany. Damn the military. Damn what we’ve done to ourselves. Burning first and foremost in her mind now was what stri­derjacks called the JonahSim, the wicked bit of self-torture common to most military personnel who’d survived when those around them, comrades and subordinates and friends, had died. She’d already been terribly conscious of the deaths of Vasily Lechenko at Kasei and of Phil Dolan at Nova Aquila, the brain death of Miles Pritchard and the reduction of Willis Daniels to a ghost at Core D9837. And now, Ran was a ghost too. She still couldn’t get the image of his Falcon exploding in front of her out of her mind.

  Something bad happens to everyone who gets close to me, she thought. The ancient, biting cliché would have made her laugh, except that right now that was precisely the way she felt. She recognized the tired, grating tone of self-pity, but she was no longer able to keep it safely stowed and locked down.

  They’d offered her the chance to con the cityship Shral­ghal, and she’d turned it down. Turned it down. That was an honor that most striderjacks would have been fighting for, the chance to teleoperate a living mountain through the eye of a needle… and call it flying.

  She’d agreed instead to serve as backup pilot, which was why she was jacked into the navigational system now, mon­itoring the Shralghal’s passage of the Stargate path. If Sen­ior Captain Carol Latimer, who was teleconning from the Gauss’s bridge, dropped the ball, Kara would be able to recover and keep them going. Latimer was good, though, and there was little for Kara to do but sit and think. In fact, she was finding that she had entirely too much time for thought. It might have been better if she’d accepted the as­signment. Guiding a mountain through a tunnel just barely wide enough to enclose it would have given her something constructive to do.

  Then the tunnel opened ahead, a blackness swallowing the blue as Gauss plunged through the interface between the more or less sane universe and something, someplace very other.

  Down the rabbit hole, Kara thought… an expression she’d heard somewhere when she was a child but couldn’t remember where. She knew she associated the phrase, though, with a place of magical wonder. Wonderland? Yes, that was it. Alice in Wonderland.…

  What would she find at the bottom of this rabbit hole?

  A purely spacelike translation, like the one the Phantoms had employed on their raid to the Galactic Core, was over almost at once, for the approach path involved traveling al­most directly toward the vast, silvery wall of the rotating cylinder. A timelike path, however, ran almost parallel to the cylinder, and the passage seemed to take much longer. Once the space-time tunnel opened, however, passage was quick… the blink of an eye, a wrenching in the gut… and then the three DalRiss city ships were rising out from the Stargate, still traveling in perfect line-ahead formation.

  No… not the Stargate; a stargate. The star-clouded skies encircling this cylinder were quite different from those around Nova Aquila, or New America, for that matter. And there were other… differences.

  And similarities as well. The star system they’d emerged in seemed to be the twin of Nova Aquila, a close-set pair of fiercely burning white dwarfs, rotating about one another with a period of several days
. At the system’s gravitational center, the stargate whirled silently, as streams of starstuff spiraled around and around, curving inward from the suns to nearly touch the two ends of the gate, and vanish.

  But beyond the gate and the circling, shrunken stars…

  “What are we seeing?” Vic said over the net, his voice tight.

  “I can’t really see,” Carol Latimer said. “It’s like… like I can’t get my eyes to focus on it. They just slide right off.”

  Kara was having the same difficulty. There was some­thing out there, something encircling both stars, but the structure was so inconceivably vast and so strangely twisted, she was having trouble making it out. Much of what humans see, she realized, is based on what they know. When faced with things beyond their experience, it can take time to learn how to see them.

  “I think,” she said carefully, “we’re seeing something like a Dyson sphere, but I think it’s not a solid. It looks from here like some kind of plasma trapped inside a delib­erately shaped magnetic Held.”

  As they continued scanning the surrounding volume of space, it became clear that the double star of the Gr’tak had been completely enclosed by a shell nearly four light minutes across—a sphere with a diameter of just under half an astronomical unit. Some billions of objects, most just a few tens of kilometers across, served as nodes for the in­credibly complex crisscrossing of tubes of pale light.

  In a way, it looked like an interlocking set of girders, interlocked at odd angles and made not of steel, but of a planet’s polar aurorae. In places, the light looked solid; in others, it was a tenuous haze. A magnified view of any of those “girders” showed that they were composed of count­less motes, specks of reflected light moving in careful­ly channeled seas of energy. The nodes might once have been planetoids, but they’d been completely remade by nano­technology or something more magical still, their surfaces gleaming like pure silver, sculpted into bizarre arrays of towers, spines, and convoluted shapes that defied architec­tural definition.

  The beams of plasma or energy that connected the nodes created the impression of a gossamer-fine webwork, a spi­derweb, perhaps, built of purest light. The motes traveling within those beams appeared to be solid, however; they might have been myriad ships. More likely, they were hab­itats of some sort, a few scores or hundreds of meters across. Perhaps they were Web kickers, the inhabitants of this place.

  “Labyrinthulids,” Daren said over the comnet. His men­tal voice cracked. “God… labyrinthulids!”

  “What are you talking about?” Kara asked her brother.

  “It’s a form of simple life,” Taki explained. “Kingdom Protoctista on Earth, but there are analogous kingdoms and phyla on other worlds too.” Taki uploaded a file, which Kara picked up and downloaded, quickly skimming through the information, which appeared to be part of a report of xenobiological studies made on Dante. The file included mi­croscopic images and sims of Terran labyrinthulids, as well as scans from a teleoperated nanoprobe of a portion of the network embedded in a Dantean commune’s brain.

  Kara could see at a glance the similarities between the microscopic net amoeba and the far vaster network of plasma conduits connecting the myriad points of light sur­rounding the double star. She assumed that similarity to be a coincidence of form and function, but the mimicry was astonishing, though the larger, artificially constructed net­work was by far more rigid and geometrically crafted than the organic one.

  She also realized that she was seeing Web engineering here, not human. The overall appearance, of a titanic spi­derweb, was also coincidence, but the wholesale conversion of an entire solar system into some kind of complex mech­anism looked more like the mark of a machine intelligence than of humans.

  “Does this… does this mean the Web won?” Kara asked, feeling bleak. “After a thousand years… damn! I’d have thought humanity would have spread out this far by now. If they didn’t—”

  “Enough of that,” Dev said sharply. “Even if the Web dominates the entire Galaxy now, remember that this is only one possible future. That’s why we’re here, to learn what we need to do to change things.”

  “Heads up, everybody,” Karyu’s weapons officer an­nounced over the general tactical net. “I’ve got multiple incoming. Kuso! They’re moving in gokking damned fast!”

  Through her link, Kara saw the dazzling gleam of a mil­lion lasers shining from the inside surface of the shell sur­rounding star and stargate, with more winking on every second. Gauss’s sensor AI put the laser spectra analysis onto a pulldown window and graphed out the absorption and emission lines and their meaning.

  The incoming were tiny things, massing no more than a few grams apiece, but driven by that barrage of laser light, they were accelerating at nearly five hundred Gs. They had begun accelerating within seconds of the GEF’s emergence from the gate. It would have taken a couple of minutes for the light announcing their arrival to reach that encircling shell, and two minutes more for the laser light of the Web’s response to return. Kara checked her inner time sense. Somehow, knowing the Web, she was not surprised to see that they didn’t deliberate on their course of action for more than a very few seconds.

  Some of the lasers were playing across the surfaces of the three DalRiss cityships, carrying joules enough to dam­age their tough hides. “Change course!” Dev cried over the link. “Change course, fast!”

  Kara saw what he was getting at. With a four-minute time lag from the stargate to the shell and back, the Web gunners would be firing at images seen a full two minutes earlier, aiming at where the cityships were going to be by the time the laser fire made the two-minute-long trek back to the Gate. If the GEF changed course several times each minute, the distant gunners would not be able to accurately predict where their targets were going to be.

  The order had scarcely been given, however, when a sud­den white flash erupted from the dark, knobbled flank of the Gharesthghal, the cityship carrying the cruiser Indepen­dence. Within the next five seconds, dozens of gouts of white light flared from Shrenghal, Gharesthghal, and Shral­ghal as the laser-wisps smashed home.

  Driven to near-light velocity, the laser-launched gossa­mers were smashing into the DalRiss vessels’ thick hides, causing terrible damage with each strike. Even as the city-ships changed course and began speeding up, the gossamers continued to streak home with deadly accuracy. Obviously, the gossamers themselves, though they massed only a few grams, had sensors and intelligence enough to correct their course en route, probably by tacking on the intense magnetic fields surrounding both stars and stargate.

  In the near distance, visible as sinister silhouettes against the light-fog backdrop of the system, a half dozen bodies, roughly spherical, as massive as fair-sized moons, were moving now toward the intruders.

  There could be no doubt at all that these were some sort of sentry squadron, posted to deal with unwanted or un­identified visitors arriving through the gate.

  “Head back for the stargate!” Vic called. “If we stay here, they’re going to take us apart!”

  “What course?” Rear Admiral Barnes replied from Karyu. “We’re not set for the next jump!”

  The next jump was supposed to be into the future… but how far was to have been determined by what they found at Doval-Tovan. A fallback set of coordinates had been uploaded to the DalRiss that would—theoretically at least—have returned them to Nova Aquila at about the time they’d left… but that would bring them out in the middle of the battle between the Imperial squadron and the remnants of the Unified Fleet.

  “We’ve got to go back,” Vic called. “We either go back and face the Imperials, or we stay here and get fried.”

  “It’s either that,” Gauss’s skipper added, “or we make a blind jump.”

  “That’s no good,” Dev said. “We’d be stranded. You’re right, Vic. We have to return. Initiate the fallback path co­ordinates.”

  Ponderously, the three cityships, guided by their tiny hu­man charges, swung abou
t onto a new course, both spacelike and timelike, descending back into the rippling blue folds of twisted space and time in which the stargate nested. Their maneuvers had eluded incoming laser beams entirely, but the living gossamers continued to pursue them, flickering in from astern to detonate on the living DalRiss ships with grim and terrible effect.

  Last in the line-of-three was Gharesthghal, and she was taking the heaviest volume of fire.

  “I can’t hold her!” Captain Hernandez, skipper of the Independence, called out on the tactical net. “I can’t hold her!” Kara wondered what he meant… then decided he was referring to the cumbersome cityship Gharesthghal, which he was trying to con from the cruiser’s bridge. The vessel was hard hit, rolling under the multiple impacts of the laser-gossamers. “I’m going to cut loose with the Indie and see if I can distract them!”

  “Negative!” Vic ordered. “Jorge, stay in line!”

  But the two-kilometer-wide mountain that was Gharesth­ghal was drifting off high and to starboard now, a huge and savagely wounded beast, falling out of control, bleeding gold and silver sparks from a dozen rips in its side. As Kara watched with mounting horror, the ship’s arms unfolded from the long and wedge-pointed shape they carried. In the next moment, the cruiser Independence was drifting free of the larger carrier, swinging her prow around to stay clear of the intensifying fields of warped space near the gate and firing her main drives in a shaft of dazzling, blue-white light.

  “Admiral Barnes!” Dev called. “Vic! Link up! We can’t let ourselves be separated!”

  Kara was aware now of a dull, far-off roar, like ocean surf, and could feel the trembling vibration as Shralghal plowed into… what? It was as though they were smashing through thickening clouds of dust and gas, but the likeliest explanation she could imagine was that space itself was growing thick, somehow, here a few hundred meters from the whirling stargate cylinder. Something was terribly wrong. They’d slipped clear of the safe channel leading on their programmed course.