“THIS IS AN EMERGENCY…
This is not a test…repeat…this is disaster…This is no dream!”
Hanna looked at the displays but she could not see the enemy. She cried out and tried to run. All the others aboard were dead, yet still they screamed in her mind. They took too long to die and dragged her down, down, and death ate at her. Smoke of burning flesh, ship metal screeching, and beyond the enemy she knew, beyond the true-human foe, something evil and unseen hunted through the darkness. Closer, closer it came, deadly, unknowable, unstoppable—and reaching out to claim only her!
THE
D’NEERAN
FACTOR
Novels of Science Fiction
by Terry A. Adams:
THE D’NEERAN FACTOR
(Sentience | The Master of Chaos)
BATTLEGROUND*
*Coming soon from DAW Books
THE
D’NEERAN
FACTOR
SENTIENCE
THE MASTER OF CHAOS
TERRY A.
ADAMS
SENTIENCE copyright © 1986 by Terry A. Adams.
THE MASTER OF CHAOS copyright © 1989 by Terry A. Adams.
Author’s Note copyright © 2013 by Terry A. Adams.
All Rights Reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-101-63559-9
Cover art by Stephan Martiniere.
Cover design by G-Force Design.
DAW Book Collectors No. 1627.
DAW Books are distributed by Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
All characters and events in this book are fictitious.
Any resemblance to persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.
The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal, and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage the electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.
First Printing, July 2013
DAW TRADEMARK REGISTERED
U.S. PAT. AND TM. OFF. AND FOREIGN COUNTRIES
—MARCA REGISTRADA HECHO EN U.S.A.
Author’s Note
The two novels that make up The D’neeran Factor had their origin in one question: What would life be like if people really, really knew what others were thinking? Science fiction seemed the most appropriate venue for exploring the question. Of course, the joy of writing science fiction—which is all I’ve ever wanted to write, really—lies in that What if…?
I try to keep the science reasonably on track, allowing for conventions of the genre (speedy interstellar travel and the ability to manipulate gravity, for instance). I’m not trained in any science. I read a lot of science for the non-scientist, but not in any disciplined way, and recognize that our perceptions and descriptions of the universe keep changing. (Even in our own little neighborhood. Pluto got demoted. Maybe it wasn’t an asteroid that caused the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction after all.) Scientists, come to think of it, are always asking, “What if?” too. And I bet they have as much fun with it as I do. Only, I’m allowed to be fuzzy about it, and they aren’t.
Out of all this reading and writing, three personal axioms have emerged.
The first is that the universe absolutely can produce anything I can imagine, and more besides.
The second is that human nature hasn’t changed since the indefinable day when “hominid” became “human,” so it’s not likely to change in the next thousand years. (I read about history and prehistory, too. Also without discipline.)
The third blossomed at the moment I became a writer. That wasn’t when I completed the first few pages of Sentience. It was when I looked at those pages and said: This could be a lot better.
The axiom is: It can ALWAYS be better.
Peace.
Terry Adams
Table of Contents
Sentience
Dedication
Prologue
Part 1
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Part 2
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
The Master of Chaos
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
SENTIENCE
Affectionately dedicated to
Lynn Brunner Carlson, Robin Brunner, and Leveda Smith
With special thanks to
Barry Fierst.
Prologue
The millefleurs sang a melody of ending. Clouds of twilight dimmed their thousand colors; rainbows faded into grayness, peace and longing mingled and black was there. Singing into silence:
Hallucination, she thought. Desperate battle to think. Oxygen loss.
She struggled for breath and lost the thought in Tirane’s screams.
But he was dead—the strength of that ego, to survive in memory still!
Dorista leaned close and said aloud, “Not lack of air.”
Shock made Hanna stupid. “But—?”
“The flowers. They’re Gabriel dying.”
Dorista wept. Hanna felt hot wetness, tasted salt. Tears of the living: Dorista, Martin, Antonia, Roly, Hanna herself. She knew these few were alive because she saw them here in Auxiliary Control.
There were also the tears of the dead.
She thought of getting up and decided against it, remembering dimly how a few minutes ago she had struggled to pick herself up off the floor and regain her seat. With clearing eyes she saw that Auxiliary Control was untouched, even though something like the heart of a star had smashed into the corvette Clara Mendoza and rammed it through space without effort. Pretty Clara with her rainbow passages, garlanded for battle: she had never had a chance against the Nestorian cruisers, nor had any of her mates.
(I want to go home oh please I’m lost lost alone and it’s dark—)
Dark-eyed Pamir. Dying too, his final thoughts echoing in her mind.
Hanna lifted her right hand and brought it down hard on the edge of the console before her. The surface was curved but she hit it with all her strength and the sharp personal pain filled her and blotted out the ghosts. In the reprieve she began calling Main Control. No voice answered. Gabriel of the millefleurs faded. Had anyone survived?
“Smashed. It was smashed.” Dorista still wept. “There can’t even be any bodies.”
“Gabriel’s, anyway.” The personal essence disappearing from the cooling flesh…the strongest took hours to go.
Voices rose round Hanna. Instinctively they were reverting to speech, the old way, the true-human way. To enter each other’s thoughts was to lose their way in the mental chaos of the injured, the dead, and the dying. Not many left injured, not now. The second assault had finished the patients from the first, along with sickbay and the medics and the drugs for pain and the drugs for dying. The third had finished everything.
“Report,” Hanna said over her shoulder, but nobody did. She turned and screamed at them, “Report!”
(Agony staggered them and stopped. They put a name to it. Don trying to keep pain to himself so it would not defeat them. Half the ship was crushed between the
m and he said: Don’t even try—)
“I am—”
(Ash, dead or dying, mourned the son he would not have—)
Hanna said through the wave of darkness, “I’m the senior officer. If Main Control is gone, I must be. Report! Concentrate!”
Ghosts moved among them, nearly visible: scraps of childhood, loving faces, the detritus of ebbing consciousness. She gave them something to concentrate on: white hatred of Nestor. Nestor, Nestor! she cried to them, and shaped the images, fanning hate. The crazed old general, the bleak warrens of an ill-managed colony world. The Polity worlds had closed ranks and done nothing for Nestor, and it was the ancient story: find an outside enemy to hate. D’neerans were easy to hate, telepaths; true-humans considered them only quasi-human. And D’neera was a peaceful world. With more love for flowers than for defenses.
Hanna kept her mind—
(Oh God, I’m so afraid, his blood, oh God, oh God—)
“Who’s—?” someone said.
She said over the swelling panic, “Alia. Not even hurt. Roly, find her and calm her down. It’s clear to Engineering.”
—kept her mind on the reports.
Main Control gone. She knew that. The few secure modules of Clara were on local life support. The reactor heat wasted into space, irretrievable; soon the cold of space would creep in. Of the twelve ships D’neera had been able to muster, only two answered now, and they were fighting, falling back. They could not come to Clara’s aid. The guns were out. Such as they were. And the shields. And Hanna’s head was spinning and her stomach lurched; gravity was erratic, it would be free fall soon.
“They want surrender,” Martin said. He snatched the link from his ear as if it had caught fire.
“Give me the link.”
But it fell to the floor as a mental howl from somewhere stopped them, and somewhere a failing heart stopped.
“Willi!”—that was Martin—“Willi!”
Hanna was stuck in a nightmare where nothing could be done. Through dimming eyes she saw Martin crawling, his frantic fear for Willi (but too late for fear; time for grief) heavy as her head.
I told them. The slow thought ticked over. I told them no lovers on the same—
The mental weight suddenly lifted. Martin sobbed and collapsed. The arm Hanna had stretched out to him hurt. She snatched up the link, fumbling it, put it to her ear and picked out the words that meant disaster.
Surrender. Immediate. Destroy.
Enough. It was too much effort to sort out the Standard words from the uncouth Nestorian accent.
“Let me see them. Tonia, what can you get?”
Her head was empty and quiet now. She supposed the living were unconscious or calming themselves. Roly had not gone after Alia; she assumed Alia had fainted. She risked a thought to Tonia that took in every sensor the Clara possessed, and an order to Dorista to evaluate their chances of escape through the unspace of Inspace. And an order to Roly to count, if he could, the living. For hand-to-hand fighting, if it came to that.
You know we’re all there is you’re good at this too good as true-human, Roly said, and it was hateful, a signal for a purely D’neeran catfight. There was no time for one. She stared him down and he bowed his head and started the hopeless job, dropping into himself and reaching out.
Tonia said unsteadily, “No visual. Nothing.”
“What about the rest?”
“I think—wait.”
Smoke began to drift through the ventilators with, oh God, the smell of burning meat.
Hanna clipped off her own horror and made them do it too.
“This is bad,” Dorista muttered.
Hanna looked at the computer’s relentless judgment. Not just bad. Fatal. Inspace systems were working, in a manner of speaking. They could Jump out of here. But incoming space-time data was getting garbled somewhere in the system, and if they Jumped—
Dorista’s vision was almost soothing. Particles fanning at random through infinity like fine gray dust…
“We’ll have to surrender,” Tonia said.
“You don’t want to surrender,” Hanna said, and Roly came out of the silence where silence should not be and stabbed her with a picture of herself as the quintessential soldier, fighting mindlessly to the end.
“Giving up is better than dying,” Tonia said.
“Come on! They want to question us. They want to find out what can hit them from the surface. And it’s an all-male army, Tonia.”
Roly looked at her blankly, the two women with growing unease. Innocent, innocent, Hanna thought in despair, how innocent we are! We feel one another’s pain and cannot harm each other. And are helpless before our brothers who are our enemies.
Tonia had forgotten the sensors. She was examining things caught from Hanna’s mind, shocking lessons in events that had happened in places that were not D’neera. Third-hand memories, fourth-hand; they had not happened to Hanna. She had only brushed against them, and imagined how it would be. But they made Tonia tremble. Giving up did not look so good.
Hanna got up and went to her and pushed her aside. There were faults in the pictures the sensors drew, colors changing for no reason, lines flickering and re-forming. But Hanna said, “What’s that?”
Her hands worked at Tonia’s controls. She knew two of the shapes—Nestorian cruisers, not as fast as Clara in realspace but bigger, better shielded, better armed, and scarcely damaged. Clara was their prey. But something new was there, and when the mass readout came she looked at it with disbelief.
“Data error,” Roly whispered.
“No.” She coaxed the library for a guess.
“Cit—” its vocal circuit said, and expired.
Citybuster, said the legend on the screen.
Gravity rocked and they fell against each other.
“It’s not after us,” Hanna said, single-minded. The others did not speak but watched the lumpy thing grow as sensors built up a pseudo-visual pattern.
“Havock,” the library said suddenly. “N.S Havock commissioned ST 2808 drydocked…ST 2809…under…terms…” It sighed and died again.
“You could stuff a hundred Claras into that,” Dorista said.
“Uh-huh. More than that. And look at those shields.”
Hanna sank into Tonia’s seat. Weight flux or defeat tore at her stomach, and she might have been watching herself go through the motions of command from a distance. She had never taken Defense as lightly as most of her comrades, who thought danger meant pirates and knew the existence of their elegant little fleet was deterrent enough. The news that Nestor would attack had not surprised her—nor should defeat; yet defeat did not seem real.
And we are all so young, she thought. Parents cannot serve…I should have had Max’s baby when he asked me.
Roly mumbled, “I don’t believe it. Mass sensors would’ve warned us.”
Hanna presented him with her memory of the third and last assault. Every alarm on Clara had been screaming, and even those sounds were dim; the voices in their minds, the soundless terror, had drowned them out.
The cruisers were beginning to move toward them. They did not have much time.
“We took them on,” Dorista said suddenly. “We did that, anyway.”
Her palpable pride annoyed Hanna. “Too little and too late,” she said.
She got up and turned away and paced the tiny chamber, leaving them to stare at Havock. She felt resentment spreading through them at the unfairness of this giant’s coming when they could do nothing to it. It felt better than Alia’s panic, anyway. It did not occur to her that her own control strengthened them.
The lights in the room seemed dimmer. She did not bother to check the power.
Dorista said, “What are they going to do?”
Hanna looked around, remembering the others had not heard the ultimatum. She told them, but she added, “I think it’s bluff. I still think they want prisoners. They won’t put that buster in place till they’re sure we’re finished. That—” She pointe
d at a signal for an incoming message; it had been flashing since she threw the link down. “That’s probably an order to stand by for boarding.”
“We can’t,” said Tonia. “I won’t. I’ll kill myself first. I’ll kill them.”
There was an overtone of wonder in what she said, as if she could not believe it of herself. Hanna looked at her thoughtfully.
“Me too,” she said. “Dorry?”
Dorista hesitated. Faint voices, visions, the traces of death, but in their minds. Dorista and Don had been friends. Don was still conscious and paralyzed with his back broken and the fire coming close. The reeking smoke had begun to choke him.
Dorista said, “I want to fight. I want to kill one for him.”
“Roly?”
He opened his mouth and shut it. He had liked Defense exercises; he had liked free fall and riding the clouds and the little band’s camaraderie. He had never expected to fight. He did not want to fight anymore and he was ashamed of not wanting to. He let them see it and Tonia touched him sympathetically, accepting it.
“Doesn’t matter,” Martin said. He pulled himself up and set his back against the wall. His grief for Willi filled the room, the world, the universe, and then he shut it in again.
“Oh, Martin,” Dorista said, and went to him and took him in her arms.
“I guess we don’t give up,” said Roly, looking sick. “But what’s the use?”
“No use,” Hanna admitted. She wandered back to her place, veering here and there as gravity wavered. It was safer sitting down. She got into her seat and stared at the outline of the city buster. D’neera had nothing dangerous on the surface. Nestor would find that out soon enough. And then this thing would move into orbit, ungainly, unbalanced, but efficient enough in space. It could blanket fifty square kilometers with fast or slow death. Its presence would guarantee there would be no resistance.
She said softly, “The Polity’s got good intelligence. They must have known Nestor refitted that thing.”
“Why didn’t they tell us?” Roly said. He was cross. He could not get used to what had happened or what was coming, and with the end nearly here he could only be querulous.
The D’neeran Factor Page 1
