Warstrider: Symbionts (Warstrider Series, Book Four)

by Ian Douglas

  Clearing the display from his mind, he opened his eyes, unjacked his helmet feeds, then slipped off his helmet and stowed it in its recess. Stepping out of the module, he found the deck with his feet. He felt . . . strange, light-headed, a little dizzy.

  Nausea rose up unexpectedly, gagging him, taking him by surprise. He vomited onto the deck, then nearly fell as the weakness swept through his body.

  Unaccountably, he found himself wanting to crawl back inside the module, to jack in and lose himself again in the glorious emptiness of space. He hurt . . . and he felt so weak he could scarcely stand.

  Supporting himself with one hand against the module, he looked up. Katya was there, looking at him with mingled fear and concern. He remembered her trying to get through to him, remembered ignoring her. There'd been nothing deliberate in that, he recalled. She simply hadn't mattered.

  He swallowed, the taste acid-hot and bitter.

  Something was very seriously wrong with him, and he had to find out what it was.

  Chapter 18

  Where earlier advances in communications and electronics represented obvious progress in Man's technical evolution, the development of cephlink technology represented a leap greater than those earlier developments by many orders of magnitude. Where earlier advances might be compared to the biological evolution of the eye, say, or of chordate anatomy, the cephlink could be compared to one of those unforeseen shifts in evolutionary direction that created whole new universes for life to exploit—comparable, say, to the colonization of the land, or the invention of sex. Many today accept human-cephlink cyborgs as an entirely new order of creature, as distinct from homo sapiens as the amphibian is from the fish and with the same, greater evolutionary promise.

  —The Rise of Technic Man

  Fujiwara Naramoro

  C.E. 2535

  Seen from orbit, ShraRish was exactly as Katya remembered it. Like Dev, she'd last orbited the world aboard the transport Yuduki, one of the armada of Hegemony and Imperial ships that had visited the twin Alyan system back in 2541. Its small oceans and landlocked seas gleamed purple beneath the blaze of Alya A, while the land was covered in vegetation that overall looked gold, but which when examined closely showed a beautiful mottling of orange, brown, ocher, yellow, red, and pink.

  And the mountains. She'd forgotten the mountains. Three billion years younger than Earth, ShraRish was more tectonically active by far than that relatively placid and middle-aged world. From orbit, the largest ranges looked like wrinklings in the skin of overripe fruit; active volcanos were marked by thousand-kilometer plumes of gray-brown smoke and ash, while on the planet's night hemisphere the eruptions showed as sullen red pinpoints wreathed in the silent throb and pulse of lightning storms. The nightside, too, was brought alive by the planet's auroral displays and meteor falls. With a more active, energetic sun than Earth, the darkness-shrouded portions of the polar areas of this world were always crowned by pale, shifting circlets of light, while a sharp eye could discern the steady flicker and streak of meteors vaporizing as they struck atmosphere.

  Two hours earlier, Eagle had entered low orbit around ShraRish and her hab modules had been set to rotating, providing a half G of spin-gravity. Valiant and Rebel were still enroute; the frigate had finally been freed from the wreckage of her drive module by surgically directed laser bursts from the corvette and was now being brought in under tow. The rest of the squadron was with Eagle in orbit, as the widely scattered fighters of the 1st Wing continued to straggle in. Mirach and the Confederation freighters were inbound from their vantage point at the frontiers of the Alyan system.

  The entire squadron was still on full alert, but unless the enemy had more ships hidden somewhere with reactors scrammed and power sources shut down, it looked as though the Confederation now controlled near-ShraRish space. Two Imperial freighters had been caught by Tarazed's warflyers before they could break orbit. The others, together with the lone surviving Imperial destroyer, had made the translation to K-T space and were long gone, almost certainly on their way back to the Shichiju.

  There'd been no response, so far, from the Imperial forces on the surface of ShraRish.

  Katya had joined Dev in Eagle's lounge, where he'd taken a seat on a low sofa bordering a sunken area in the middle of the room, while she stood before him, hands on hips. She was furious at him, more angry, if that was possible, than she'd been when Sinclair had given her the order to leave New America.

  "Just what the hell is the matter with you, Dev?" she demanded, ignoring the white, gold, and violet panorama on the lounge viewall behind the sofa. Set to display the planet's surface as seen from a camera mounted on Eagle's bow, the screen revealed no movement save the steady, silent glide of clouds, seas and mountains over the curve of the planet.

  "Nothing," Dev replied. "I told you, nothing! I'm fine!"

  "You get sick all over the deck coming out of link, you can hardly stand up, and you tell me you're fine?"

  He looked a little better now than when she'd met him by the link module. She'd slap-injected him with medical nano, then helped him back into the module, jacked him in, and summoned a med-psych monitor on the link.

  "It's okay, Kat. I'm okay. Don't make more of it than it is."

  "That, Dev, sounds like a classic case of denial. I don't want to hear what you think. What did the monitor program say? Or do I have to haul you down and let the nanosomatic engineers take you apart?"

  "My physiodiagnostics still check okay," he told her. "I'm a little . . . depressed, is all."

  "Depressed? Depressed? Depression doesn't make people vomit. And it doesn't turn people as close as we've been into strangers."

  He sighed. "Hate to tell you, Kat, but you're wrong. It does all that, and more."

  "Did the monitor suggest treatment?"

  He nodded. "It prescribed a series of sex and relaxation ViRsims, and a daily, five-minute series of in-link alpha modulations. Tranquilizers, in other words."

  "Okay. Fine. Are you doing it?"

  He gave a half smile. "I've hardly had time to, have I? Anyway, I . . . I don't think I really want to."

  "Why the hell not?"

  "Because I'm more than halfway convinced that linking is my problem."

  Katya felt herself go cold. "What, you think you're going null? That's ridiculous, Dev, and you know it."

  Nulls were those people who, for physiological, psychological, religious, or ethical reasons could not accept the nano-grown cephlink hardware that allowed them to interact with technic society. They formed a substantial, if largely invisible, minority throughout both the Core and Frontier of the Shichiju.

  "No, I'm not going null. Quite the opposite, in fact. I . . . think I'm in some kind of withdrawal."

  Katya looked for the right words to say, then failed. Withdrawal? She knew whatever Dev was going through had to be wrapped up in his experience with the Xenolink, since he'd never had any real trouble with linkage one way or the other before. He'd always shown a slight tendency toward technomegalomania, enough, she remembered, to get him disqualified for the Hegemony Navy, but except for an occasional touch of recklessness, it had never seemed to affect him.

  What had changed?

  At that moment, several off-duty engineers entered the lounge. Katya didn't want to discuss something so personal as this in public, especially something that could erode the confidence the squadron's personnel felt in their military CO if it got around.

  Dev was obviously thinking the same thing. "Well, Katya," he said rising from the sofa, "I'd better get back to work. Want to be linked in when Rebel hauls the Valiant into orbit. I'll talk to you more about it later, if you want. I assure you, though, that there's nothing wrong. Later?"

  "At dinner," she told him. "Officers' mess."

  "At dinner." He walked out, leaving her alone by the viewall.

  But he wasn't at dinner. When she inquired through Eagle's AI network, she learned he was in a tactical sim, overseeing the beginnings of the repai
r work to both Constellation and Valiant. She left word for Dev that she would be in the lounge, then returned there to find a seat in front of the viewall.

  The compartment was fairly crowded when she got there. Brenda Ortiz was there, along with several of the scientists and programmer techs from the expedition's contact team.

  She stood before the viewall for a time, watching the drift of ShraRish's seas and clouds. In the distance, an odd assembly of bulky, angular shapes gleamed in the sunlight. Frigates were, by ship-class definition, larger than corvettes, but Rebel was still wearing her skip rider, and the dismounted Valiant looked like a toy clutched tightly against the other ship's belly.

  Was Dev really addicted to linkage? She'd heard of such things happening, of course, though usually it involved some poor guy—or gal—wiring into a continuous orgasm loop and burning out the pleasure centers. Such people weren't good for much after that, not without a massive neural rewrite, a reprogramming of memory and personality that amounted to wiping the brain clean and starting over.

  She shuddered, preferring not to think about that. Whatever was haunting Dev was nothing so obvious as sex addiction. He'd mentioned being depressed, but this was more subtle than TDS, or technodepressive syndrome. He could still function and didn't seem impaired in any way.

  But how would it affect his performance as the squadron's commanding officer? If he had to be relieved, Lisa Canady would replace him, and while Katya had nothing specific against her, the woman was still something of an unknown quantity.

  Maybe, she told herself, it's none of your business. Go back to the Trixie, see to your troops, and get ready for the landings. You're going to have enough to worry about without wondering what's going on in Dev's scrambled brains.

  But she couldn't just walk away from him. She had to help. But how?

  "It's beautiful, isn't it?"

  Katya started. Brenda Ortiz stood at her side, a glass of caff in her hand. She was staring at the viewall display, where the curved horizon of ShraRish bowed against the tiny, blazing disk of Alya A. Eagle was past the planet's terminator and falling into night.

  "It makes you wonder," Brenda continued, "just how accurate our notions of our own planet's history really are."

  "What do you mean?"

  Brenda nodded toward the planet below. "Everything we've learned about that ecosystem has been teaching us more about our own. And about life in general. It turns out that the evolution of life isn't quite so unlikely as we always thought."

  "Oh, I don't know," Katya said. She welcomed the distraction, needing to think about something else for a while, before her software burned itself into a loop. "Living ecologies are still scattered pretty thinly. Otherwise, we wouldn't have to do as much terraforming as we do, right?"

  "Oh, ecologies where we can live comfortably are rare enough, all right. But everything we learn about life, about how it works as a system, how it spreads, how it evolves, everything everything demonstrates that life is a part of the natural order of things. It's as though the universe was designed specifically to produce life. It's not an accident."

  "You're starting to sound like a Determinist," Katya said, grinning to disarm what could have sounded like a challenge of Brenda's intelligence. Determinism was one of the host of more or less fuzzy-minded religions that had appeared among the worlds of the Shichiju, a tenet that, like predestination before it, held that everything that happened in the universe was preordained and beyond the reach of human will.

  "The first great revolution of biology," Ortiz said, with the air of a classroom lecturer, "was the theory of evolution. The second was genetics, and the understanding that life was an elaborate means of preserving and transmitting DNA.

  "The third began when we realized that the beginnings of life on Earth stretched back a lot farther into the past than we'd imagined at first. Fossil evidence showed that there was life on the planet within half a billion years after a solid crust formed. Right?"

  "I'm linked."

  "Okay. That early appearance of life on Earth demonstrates that wherever you have CHON—carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen—plus assorted seasonings and a mean temperature range between zero and one hundred Celsius, sooner or later—and probably sooner—life is going to appear."

  "Wait, that's what I don't understand. Most of the worlds of the Shichiju were prebiotics. No life . . . just the building blocks life needed to get started. I thought the idea was that life was limited to worlds that had something like a large, close moon to stir things up on a regular cycle."

  Brenda nodded. "Ah, yes. The old Tidal Theory."

  "Right. Worlds that had their own native ecologies before humans showed up are rare. Earth. New America and New Earth. Eridu. Maia. Six or eight others in a volume of space a hundred light years across. And the Alyan worlds, of course, and even there ShraRish started off lifeless."

  "Exactly. Out of the eighty-some worlds we know with the prerequisite conditions for life, fifteen developed their own ecosystems. Almost twenty percent. And life was deliberately introduced on the rest."

  "Well, yes, but those others were terraformed. Humans deliberately creating a new ecosystem where there was none before. It wasn't . . ."

  "Natural?"

  "Right. It wasn't natural."

  "How do you distinguish natural from artificial?"

  "Easy. We planted life on places like Liberty and Herakles by using technology, and lots of it. Sky-els and atmosphere generators as big as mountains, just for a start. Now that's artificial."

  "How life does what it does is beside the point, Katya. Look at the Nagas. They spread from world to world too, but not by what we would call intelligent volition. They're undeniably intelligent, yes, but their world view and their version of technology are so different from what we know that the actual process, blindly firing capsules containing nanotechnic matter programmed with the template of a new Naga, really isn't any more reasoned than when two people have sex and conceive a child. The mechanics of the process aren't conscious and they aren't planned, at least not by us. Another way of looking at it is that life planned it that way, through biodiversity and natural selection. I've heard it said that we are DNA's way of making more DNA."

  Katya laughed. "I see your point. Still, it's hard to see life as an automatic process when eighty percent of the worlds we've found that could have had life, didn't."

  "Ah, but how many of those worlds might have developed their own ecosystems, given another billion years or two?"

  "Well, as I understand it," Katya said, "that Tidal Theory you mentioned a minute ago says that strong tides are necessary for the appearance of life. That the constant mixing of CHON soup in the twice-daily rise and fall of the tides, coupled with the appropriate thermal and ultraviolet input, gives a regularity to hot and cold, light and dark, wet and dry that encourages the appearance of long-chain molecules that are both strong enough to survive the cycles and complex enough to self-replicate. That sure seems to explain the native life on New America, at any rate." Katya's homeworld possessed a single huge, close satellite, Columbia, that raised gentle but enormous tides across the world's oceans twice in each long day.

  "Maybe the moonless worlds are just slow," Brenda said with a smile. "They still have the tides generated by the local sun, those that rotate, anyway. And maybe there are other ways of doing things that we don't understand yet."

  "Like the way life got started originally on GhegnuRish?"

  "Especially how it got started on GhegnuRish so early in the planet's history, and how it developed so quickly. It's almost as though life knows it doesn't have much time before a star like Alya leaves the main sequence and makes the planet uninhabitable.

  "That's why I was wondering about whether we know all there is to know about our own planet's history." She gestured at the golden globe of ShraRish, a glorious splash of color hiding sulfurous volcanoes and sulfuric acid rain. "Looking at that, it makes me wonder. Those earliest fossils we've found on Ear
th, the ones going back to the first billion years or so of Earth's evolution, they're obviously simple things, but they don't tell us much about the actual conditions, save that there was liquid water present. We can guess about the actual composition of the atmosphere, of course. CO2. Sulfur compounds in the air."

  "You're saying conditions on the early Earth were like those on the DalRiss worlds." Katya wondered where she was going with this.

  "Not really," Brenda said. "The modern Alyan atmosphere isn't any more similar to what it evolved from than Earth's atmosphere today is to its atmosphere three billion years ago. Environmental conditions are changed and regulated by life. But conditions on the early Earth and on the early GhegnuRish must have been similar. A lot more similar than they are today. Probably the main difference was in how much energy the system received from its sun.

  "It got me wondering if maybe there'd been a time, early in our planet's history, when life was basically, uh, DalRissan. Breathing CO2 and giving off oxygen, utilizing sulfur compounds for energy-transfer molecules, the way we use phosphates. Maybe there was a whole, entire alternate biology on Earth that we don't know about today, one that was wiped out when too much oxygen was dumped into the atmosphere or that couldn't compete with our kind of life when it wiggled along or, well, whatever. You've heard of the Burgess Shale?"

  Katya shook her head.

  "One of the great paleontological discoveries of history. A group of fossils from five hundred fifty million years ago that included types of animal completely unrelated to modern life. Things so bizarre that, well, the name given to one species was Hallucigenia."