by Ian Douglas
She made her way down from Ops to the maintenance bay, which, like the rest of the building, had been sealed off and cleared of contaminated air, flushed with nitrogen from the base's reserves, then brought to standard temperature and pressure with the rest of the facility. Both sets of main doors had been closed, restoring their air lock function. Inside the bay, any lingering traces of ShraRishan atmosphere were masked by the sharper stink of smoldering wreckage—rubber and plastic, steel and duralloy.
Assassin's Blade rested in one of the service gantries, the gaping wound in its left shoulder where the arm had been torn away spilling a tangle of half-melted wires, cables, and control circuitry. It would be awhile before the big RS-64 was fit for service again.
Carefully picking her way down the strider-warped steps of the stairway, she dropped onto the metal grating of the deck and strode toward a group of eight or ten striderjacks standing near the Blade. One of them saw her approaching and nudged one of the others. A second later, and they all were cheering, thrusting clenched fists in the air and calling her name. "Katya! Katya!" Others in the maintenance bay took up the chant. For a moment, embarrassment warmed Katya's face and she wanted to turn and leave. Then a surge of pride kicked in . . . pride not in herself so much as in these people.
Her people.
"C'mon, c'mon," she called, yelling to make herself heard. "As you were!" She caught one of the striderjacks with her eyes. "Callahan! I need a strider. What's available?"
Sublieutenant Jesse Callahan pointed toward a pair of machines standing empty and powered-down to either side of the maintenance bay door, a LaG-42 Ghostrider and an Ares-12 Swiftstrider. "Those two are free, Colonel." He looked eager. "Where you goin', sir? Need a number two?"
"No, take me!" another called.
"I'll go!"
"Negative," Katya told them. "I'm just going out on a circuit of the base. You all carry on here. That your Swiftie, Callahan?"
"Yessir."
"I'm going to borrow it for a bit, if you don't mind."
"Kuso, no prob—I mean, sure, Colonel!" His face lit with pleasure. "Help yourself!"
Callahan's Swiftstrider was nicknamed Longlegs, and its nose art—-surprisingly chaste for the art form—portrayed a woman with long, bare legs but otherwise fully clothed. It took Katya about fifteen minutes to set the Ares-12's AI to her cephlink and brain activity, with the computer asking questions or telling her to visualize certain images while it calibrated the linkage to her specs. At last, though, the full linkage engaged. Katya brought the power up full, took an experimental step forward, then swung to face the air lock doors. "Ops, this is Dagger One," she said over the tactical channel. "I'm going out."
"Anything wrong, Colonel?" Crane's voice shot back.
"Not a thing, Captain. I just want to run a quick visual check on the perimeter."
"How's your ammo?"
She'd already checked. "About half, and full power on the lasers. All systems read tight and hot."
"Opening up. Keep your channel open, Colonel, and don't get too far out."
"Will do, Captain. Thanks."
Moments later, she was outside again. Several Confederation striders were already outside, keeping watch. She ignored them, setting the Ares-12 in motion toward the tumbled-down eastern fence.
She was not going to sit and brood about Dev Cameron. Impulsively, she wanted to do something, and this was the one thing that came to mind.
Picking her way with birdlike agility past the fallen fence, Katya stepped into the midst of the ShraRish flora reclaiming the land that once had been the site of a DalRiss city. Beyond the clearing, the forest beckoned.
Katya set her course due east and kept moving.
Chapter 23
One key indicator of intelligence must be the ability—and willingness—of A to communicate with B, both in B's language, and within B's cultural and perceptual framework. The converse, expecting B to speak A's language . . . or to understand it as A continues to speak A's language with greater volume and slower speed, is certainly an indicator not of intelligence, but of abject stupidity.
—Cultures in Conflict
Sidney Francesco Dawes
C.E. 2449
"The dead things have never ventured so far from the emptiness, Lifemaster." The Watcher tightened its grip on the projecting branch and leaned out farther past the gently twisting trunk of the tree, attempting to follow the progress of the strange shape moving into the forest. The sound combination it used for "dead things" and "emptiness" were virtually identical, and given difference only by the creature's inflection. In its perception, the forest was a sparkling, dancing three-dimensional sea of what humans might have seen as light; the "dead thing" was an empty shape, a hollow vaguely outlined by the ri-glow of life. Beyond, the emptiness was afar vaster void where life had once been, but which now had the shape and flavor of barren rock, a hole in the fabric of life.
"Keep tasting the dead thing," the Lifemaster replied, its voice relayed to the Watcher through a small organ, a living radio growing at the base of its brain. "Tasting," for the DalRiss, meant active sampling through sonar, a high-frequency, sonic probing that yielded volumes of information about the composition and workings of soft-skinned objects but told next to nothing about rocks and other dead things.
"I am tasting, Lifemaster," the Watcher said. "The dead thing moves but has no taste at all. Do you expect it to change?"
"We expect nothing. Keep it under observation until we arrive."
"Who comes?"
"A Decider."
"A decision is to be made, then?"
"Only if necessary. But the dead thing's movements suggest that it will be."
The forest was hauntingly beautiful despite the strangeness of the shapes, a shaded place out of the direct blaze of Alya A's light, where the trees, if they could be called that, wove interlacing tendrils overhead in a canopy of red and gold and pink. Here, the fiercest competition for light took place meters above the ground, and the forest floor was almost empty of vegetation. There was a carpet of sorts, like moss, but softer, almost liquid, and glowing the color of ripe grain in a New American field. Some growths were festooned with dripping masses of foam, which appeared to be a life-form in its own right rather than some analog of sap flowing from the trees . . . mildly disgusting until Katya remembered a tiny New American creature that churned small masses of froth to hide itself and its eggs. A particular insect on Earth did much the same.
That link in form carried with it a measure of familiarity. However alien the life, there were certain rules that would be obeyed, certain forms that would be repeated. Unless the DalRiss genegineers had twisted the natural system completely out of shape, predator and prey would establish the same relationships, and the formulas this world's life used to eat and grow and survive and reproduce would all have been familiar to Darwin, however strange the shape of the life itself.
Katya felt out of place here, moving her four-and-a-half-meter duralloy body through that pristine riot of alien vegetation. She'd had to cut out the input from her motion detectors as soon as she'd left the Imperial base, and in this heat her thermal sensors were all but useless. Still, she was aware of what had to be animal life as well. There were . . . things in the trees and plant-clusters around her, small and secretive for the most part, though once something crashed away through the brush in front of her with the noise of a small avalanche.
And there was other noise as well, bombarding her through her external sound pickups. The air around her was filled with a cacophony of high-frequency whistles, chirps, buzzes, and hissing static. She could not tell whether she was listening to the mindless calls of animals, the ranging chirps of sonar . . . or an invitation to stop and take part in some intelligent conversation.
It might also have been a challenge . . . or a warning. She tried not to think about that possibility.
Katya brought the Swiftstrider to a halt well inside the forest and scanned her surroundings car
efully across a full 360 degrees. She was surrounded by life here. Save for a nearby outcropping of rock and for the duralloy shell of her warstrider, every visible surface was an organic one, even if some of the textures and surfaces looked like nothing she had ever seen before. This place would do well as a test site.
The experiment was an inherently simple one, concocted after she'd reviewed once more what she knew of the DalRiss. The key to understanding the DalRiss seemed to be their reverence for life . . . or was it simply their fascination? At the Imperial base, however, she'd been struck by the blatant confrontation between the duralloy and fabricrete of the human-built structures and the living ecology that surrounded it. She couldn't help but wonder if the DalRiss attack had somehow been the product of that confrontation, either an admonition to keep off the local equivalent of grass, or an expression of the fear that creatures capable of burying that grass under pavement must be capable of anything.
Evidently, the Imperials had been thinking along the same lines, though they hadn't yet dared to do anything about it. According to the personal journal he'd kept in the base computer net, Kosaka had been trapped in an agony of indecision after the DalRiss attack. Unwilling to demand an evacuation—fleeing after that one incident would have resulted in a considerable loss of face—he'd nonetheless feared doing anything that might trigger another assault. He'd not repaired the perimeter fence because some of the civilian scientists had speculated that the DalRiss might be sensitive to the flow of electric current, that they'd therefore deliberately knocked part of the fence down while inflicting only minor damage to other parts of the facility.
Katya was pretty sure now that it hadn't been the fence that had provoked the attack. Indeed, it was likely that the "attack" had been pure accident. The southeastern corner of the Dojinko base happened to lie directly between the former site of the nearby DalRiss city and the immense gathering known as the Migrant Camp a thousand kilometers to the southwest. The DalRiss were blind by human standards, lacking even vestigial eyes. They "saw" using a kind of sonar, like terrestrial bats or dolphins, and possibly through other senses for which humans had no referents.
Was it possible that they'd begun moving toward the Migrant Camp in pursuit of some logic or instinct unknown to the human observers . . . and simply blundered into something they hadn't even seen? The mesh of that perimeter fence was composed of extremely fine conducting wires, wires so fine that they might well be below the resolving threshold of the DalRiss senses.
Katya had carried her reasoning farther. Brenda Ortiz had told her once that the DalRiss actually claimed to sense life, to be aware of it as humans were aware of light, that they thought of themselves as moving through a three-dimensional sea of interlocking, living systems, from the haze of bacteria adrift in the air to fellow DalRiss. Assuming that was literally true and not an artifact born of differences in language and culture, was it possible that the DalRiss sensed human structures, buildings, say, as dead space, as a kind of emptiness defined only by the life pressing in around it?
Was that how they perceived a warstrider . . . or a human encased in a plastic and ceramic E-suit?
Katya was determined to find out, and she'd come here to do it. Carefully, she studied her met and environmental readouts. The temperature outside was a sultry forty-two Celsius, the humidity stood at seventy percent. The concentration of sulfuric acid was running about eight hundred parts per million, enough to irritate unprotected eyes or mucus membranes over a period of time, but too weak, she was sure, to damage exposed skin. Being caught in the open by a sudden rainstorm would be bad, but she ought to have time to get to cover before she was burned. More dangerous by far, she thought, would be the ultraviolet from the sun. Exposure to Alya A's direct rays would burn unprotected human skin in minutes. This far into the shade of the forest, though, she should be safe enough.
Methodically, she ran through the Swiftstrider's checklists, shutting down systems and putting the machine into a standby doze. The communications center she left switched on and primed to relay any incoming messages. Then she broke linkage with it, waking inside the Ares-12's slot. Holding back the familiar, smothering feeling of claustrophobia, she jacked a compatch into her right T-socket. If a radio call came in while she was outside, she would hear it. Then, moving carefully in the padded near-darkness, she donned mask and PLSS pack, then opened the hatch.
Golden light filtered through the forest canopy, bathing her in sauna heat. Swiftly, before she could lose her nerve, she climbed down the rungs set against the strider's armored leg, then stepped off onto mossy ground. She stood there for another moment or two, watching the surrounding woods. Then, taking a deep breath, she began to strip off her clothing.
She left on her mask, of course, which included built-in goggles that protected her eyes both from sulfur compounds in the air and from the high levels of ultraviolet in the light. Her PLSS pack was small and light enough to be worn slung from her left shoulder. She also kept her boots on. She was willing to risk exposing bare skin to the ShraRish atmosphere, but the vegetation was something else. If it was anything like plants on New America or Earth, it would concentrate water in its tissues . . . and possibly other compounds as well, such as the sulfuric acid that tainted everything here. For now, at least, she would keep her feet modestly covered.
Katya draped the suit from one of the ladder rungs on the strider, then moved away from the looming machine. The ground vegetation—might as well call it moss, which it resembled more than not—didn't move and writhe the way some Alyan vegetation in the open did, probably because it received less light in the shade of the forest. Each step, however, launched surges of scarlet color against the gold that flowed out from her feet like ripples in a pond, fading with distance. The rock outcropping was dry and empty of native vegetation. She would wait there for a time and see what happened.
Nudity had never been a requirement for communicating with the DalRiss before, certainly. During previous meetings, she'd usually worn an E-suit with either an air mask or a helmet, and it hadn't seemed to pose any problem for communications, either perceptually or diplomatically.
But if her guess about the DalRiss and the way they perceived humans was right, they would be curious about beings that went about wrapped up in nonliving material. Possibly, humans were only visible as empty shapes against the background of DalRissan life, or as disembodied fragments of living skin when they actually dared to remove helmets or gloves. For their parts, DalRiss never wore clothing, though some had been seen to wear a kind of harness, which was itself a living, gene-crafted organism of some kind.
Given that the trouble with the Imperials almost certainly stemmed from their deliberate separation from the surrounding tapestry of life, they might interpret Katya's gesture as courtesy; at the very least they should be curious enough to initiate a conversation.
And the gesture served a second, conscious purpose, too, a means of showing the DalRiss that she was somehow different from the duralloy-shrouded strangers that had occupied the base before.
At least, that was the idea, but the longer Katya sat on the rock and waited, the more foolish she felt. She had no reason beyond a rather vague intuition to think that any DalRiss might be nearby and watching. Had they been humans, they certainly would have left scouts nearby to keep an eye on the—to them—alien base, but the DalRiss were not human, and what seemed reasonable to Katya might be utterly beyond their ken. Consulting her cephlink for the time, she decided to give them thirty minutes. After that, well, she would have to think of something else.
If she waited much longer than that, she might find herself having to explain what the hell she was doing to whoever came out here looking for her.
Minutes passed, with no response from the woods. The heat was overwhelming, sapping her reserves, draining her as sweat dripped around her mask and trickled down her bare back. She wondered about the ultraviolet here . . . and about the acid in the steamy atmosphere. After a while, the sensi
tive skin of her breasts began prickling, then itching, enough so that she wondered if the droplets of acid floating in the air were irritating her after all. The itching spread, to shoulders and throat, belly and thighs, and it was all she could do to keep from scratching . . . or giving up and fleeing for the shelter of the warstrider. When she glanced down at herself, though, she saw no redness or other sign of irritation.
In fact, the sheen of sweat covering her entire body was reassuring in a way. Any acidic droplets of water floating in the air would become so diluted when they mingled with the moisture coating her skin that she would never feel it. With that realization, much of the itching faded away, the product, she decided, of an overactive imagination.
When this was over, though, she was definitely going to enjoy a long and luxurious shower back at the base.
She'd almost decided it was time to give up when she became aware of the Alyan standing among the dancing shapes of light and shadow, some twenty meters to her right. How long had it been there? Seconds or hours, there was no way to tell. She recognized the usual incarnation of the DalRiss, however, a six-armed starfish body, measuring perhaps three meters from armtip to armtip, but standing on the ends of those arms in a most unstarfishlike way. Sprouting from the top of the body was the complicated cluster of body parts and tentacles that was the Riss portion of the symbiosis.
The joining was complete enough that it looked as though the two life forms were one. Katya was reminded of a download she'd taken once in Earth history describing the arrival on the American continent of European explorers and conquerors. The population of that continent had never seen horses and had imagined the alien soldiers on their strange mounts to be hybrid monsters combining the body parts of men and deer in one enormous creature.
