Jackers

by William H. Keith

  It had become more defenseless still when the Imperial troops, commanded by one Colonel Nagai, had decided to withdraw in the face of swarming hordes of Xeno snakes. He’d ordered Captain David Morgan of the 62nd to withdraw as well, but Morgan and 387 volunteers—most of the strength of his force—had refused. Argos had a civilian population of nearly eight hundred thousand, and that number had nearly doubled over the past weeks as outlying settlements had been overrun by the insatiable hordes of snakelike, deadly Xenophobes. His Hegemon infantry was all that stood between the advancing Xenos and the Argos Sky-el.

  Chance and geography had favored the defense. Xenophobes, for reasons unknown, avoided seawater, and Argos was located on an equatorial peninsula jutting southwest into the Alcmenan Sea. Astride the narrow isthmus northward was Mount Athos, at thirteen hundred meters one of Herakles’s more mediocre peaks, but ideally positioned for defending the single land approach to the capital.

  The troops had held Mount Athos through wave after wave of Xenophobe assault, fighting them with hand weapons, with semiportable lasers and cannons dismounted from vehicles, with jury-rigged bombs and crudely programmed nano-D. They’d held out for nearly two weeks, during which time most of the planet’s civilian population escaped up the sky-el to the gathering fleet of transports mustered there from across the Shichiju. The severely wounded in Morgan’s band were evacuated with the civilians; the lightly wounded hung on, scavenging the battlefield for ammunition and partially charged laser power packs. In the end, sixteen unwounded members of the unit abandoned their positions on Mount Athos and escaped up the sky-el. Numerous Xenos had already broken past Mount Athos or tunneled up inside the city from below and were beginning to digest the city’s structures, but Morgan’s men had staved off the inevitable collapse long enough for the evacuation to be completed.

  David Morgan himself had not lived to see the victory. On the third day he’d tried to drag a fallen comrade from beneath an advancing Xenophobe Mamba, been hit himself, and been crushed to death.

  The stand, called Morgan’s Hold, had been enshrined in song and story and ViRdrama throughout the Frontier, despite the Empire’s efforts to suppress it. Nagai’s abrupt decision to evacuate did not reflect well on Imperial honor and martial prowess when contrasted with the determination of the Heglegger troops, and more than one Hegemony soldier had been cashiered or worse for singing “The Ballad of Morgan’s Hold,” or even for having the words and music downloaded into his personal RAM. The song had become something of a cry of defiance by Frontier rebels against the Imperial tyranny.

  Song and legend, too, remained part of the ongoing rivalry between foot soldiers and warstriders; Nagai’s marines had been elite striderjacks, and their combat machines had been top-of-the-line Daimyos and Samurais. Reportedly, not one warstrider had been lost in the defense of Argos, and at the time it had been widely reported that leg infantry—leggers—simply could not stand up to Xeno snakes.

  Morgan’s people had given the lie to that idea.

  The very shape of the planet’s geography had been altered by the aftermath of the battle. One hour after the last human had left Herakles, a five-hundred-megaton bomb provided by Nagai’s marines had been detonated in the sky-el, just above Argos. The fireball had eradicated the city and scooped out a vast, shallow crater into which the sea had poured, an avenging, white-foam flood. Thundering, rising clouds of steam had blotted out half the hemisphere for months afterward. From space, the Augean Peninsula now looked as though a gigantic bite had been taken out of it, and the new, inland sea created by the city’s immolation was still radioactive.

  Dev shivered, the reaction partly due to the thought of Argos’s destruction, but partly too from the cold. He palmed the control patch of his bodysuit and wished up its internal heat.

  He was thinking about the huge, pyramidal atmosphere nanoconverters… one of which Dev could see from here, a smooth-sided, triangular mountain against the northern horizon. The air tasted hard and thin, with a metallic bite to it. The oxygen percentage stood now at about twelve percent, with a partial pressure of .108 atm., low, but breathable. The Heraklean terraforming project had not been entirely complete when the Xenos had appeared, and the atmosphere generators had been shut down twenty-eight years before.

  By making the air breathable, those artificial mountains had also rendered the climate cooler. Temperatures had been dropping steadily on Herakles for two centuries and might drop farther still if the converters weren’t soon brought back on-line. If the Xeno hadn’t destroyed them—and apparently it hadn’t—they would one day make the world’s air thicker and warmer as well.

  “So where is the local Xeno?” Petruccio asked, shaking Dev from his thoughts. “We keep expecting to see him any day.”

  Dev looked around. The landscape in every direction was barren—the rock seared naked where the white flame that had destroyed Argos had lightly brushed across it. In the distance, though, Dev thought he could make out flecks of green and the gray and brown of endless rock.

  “Underground, certainly,” he said.

  “And that’s where we’ll have to go to find it,” Sinclair added. “We’ll have survey teams out looking for cavern entrances or old snake pits as soon as we can organize them. Then we bring Fred down and let him earn his passage.”

  “Actually,” Dev said, “I wonder if that’ll be necessary. Looking for holes, I mean.” He was staring once again at the triangular regularity of the atmosphere nanogenerator looming above the northern horizon. “If the Naga here is playing true to form, there’s another way to reach him. A faster way.”

  He began describing his idea to the others.

  Chapter 21

  We see, of course, not with our eyes, but with our brain—same for hearing, touch, smell, and taste—and our conversations with others are carried out entirely inside our heads. External physical sensation is gathered by the visual, auditory, tactile, or other sensory nerves, and not until it is relayed to the brain is it interpreted as light and dark, as hard or soft, as lover’s face or clenched fist, as smell of genegineered froses or taste of vinegar. Indeed, we live out our lives in magnificent isolation, a universe within our skulls, with but the slenderest and most deceivable of feeds bringing us fresh data about the outside world.

  —The Rise of Technic Man

  Fujiwara Naramoro

  C.E. 2535

  They stood on the mountaintop beneath a sky gone black, vast and thick-strewn with diamond stars. Dev had asked Katya after a communal dinner in the main hab dome whether she would like to take a walk.

  Dev knew that something had been troubling Katya since before their precipitous departure from New America, and he was pretty sure he knew what it was. Still, throughout the long passage between the stars, they’d had no chance to discuss it. Eagle had been crowded with passengers for which she’d not been equipped. He’d wanted to share some linked downtime with Katya, just to talk, but feared the suggestion would be taken as an invitation to ViRsex and nothing more. Strangely, he found himself shy around Katya now… but her evident distress made him want to reach out and lake her in his arms.

  Her willingness to walk with him delighted, as the night of this world entranced. Westward, zodiacal light mounted toward heaven, a diffuse and pale gold pillar just bright enough to banish the dimmest stars. Thirty light-years from Sol, the constellations were already strange, though northward the familiar hourglass of Orion was visible, only slightly distorted and with a distance-dimmed Sirius now shifted by perspective closer to far Rigel. Sol lay in that direction, Dev knew, but was lost here below the horizon.

  Bright in the night was Zeta Herculis, a golden spark to the southwest. A subgiant like Mu Herc, six times more luminous than vanished Sol, Zeta was less than nine lights distant and nearly as brilliant here as was Sirius from Earth.

  Between east and zenith, a gold thread stretched taut among the stars. Herakles’s space elevator, cast adrift among so many stars, looked like a straight-l
ine scratch against ebon black and was so large and so far that its orbital motion, like a natural satellite’s, could not be distinguished by the naked eye. Clustered at its hub were swarming yet motionless stars, sunlight reflections from the ships of the tiny Confederation fleet.

  Among the largest and grandest of all man’s technological works, the broken sky-el seemed nearly lost among so much immensity.

  “It’s so vast,” Katya said, awe behind the words as she stared into the heavens. “I don’t know how the Naga can comprehend such emptiness, how they can endure it, it’s so different from what they know.”

  “It is that,” Dev agreed. “Especially when they never, like we do, just lie back and look up and wonder. What gets me is the idea of their actually bridging such gulfs.”

  “Hurling bits of themselves at the stars. The energies involved must be… staggering.”

  “Nothing less. You know, on the way here, I ran some calculations, based on what we know, what we think we know, from our Xeno links. Assuming one-ton projectiles—”

  “Why?”

  He shrugged. “A guess, frankly. The actual payload, the seed from which they populate a new planet, is probably all nano and no more massive than my fist. But the pod that carries it must sense other stars, must pick out worlds of proper temperature and magnetic field and, oh, whatever else is important to such a being. And it tacks and steers, somehow, on the Galaxy’s magnetic field. Anyway, the world-Naga must pack one hell of a punch behind those pods when it launches them. Like a magnetic railgun, it must shoot the things skyward with tremendous speed. Not just vee-sub-ee for the planet, but escape velocity for the entire star system. Otherwise the pod would fall short and just orbit in the dark between the stars forever.”

  Katya shivered and drew closer. “That can’t be a natural adaptation. It seems to be part of the Naga’s life cycle now, the way it extends itself from world to world, but it couldn’t have been so always.”

  “Sure. Picked up along the way, how many billions of years ago? From the little I’ve seen, felt rather, the technology was absorbed from some unlucky, spacefaring culture assimilated early on, maybe from the same source as they acquired their nanotechnic parasites.”

  “Parasites?”

  “Symbionts, then. Of course, once you get down to nanotech scales, words like ‘organic’ and ‘artificial’ start to lose their meaning.”

  “They do, don’t they?” Katya said. “Still, reaching for the stars was never part of their original, their organic evolution. That had to have come later.”

  “And why not? The same could be said of us, now that we’re free of Earth.”

  “Free?”

  He grinned. “Thus speaks the New American revolutionary. Free physically, Kat, if not yet in spirit. That will come. We’re already too different in culture, in ways of thought, for the Empire to hold onto us much longer.”

  “And we have the Galaxy as inheritance now.”

  “Shared with folk like the Naga and the DalRiss, yes. Both are so different, from each other and from us. I wonder how different the others we’ll meet out there one day might seem?”

  “We share starfaring, the three of us.”

  “Yeah, only the Xenos do it without even knowing there are such things out there as stars. I wonder how many of those pods are adrift out there, falling forever between the worlds because they didn’t happen to be pointed in the right direction?”

  Katya shivered again and he put his arm around her, drawing her close. She’d come out into the night without her accustomed bodysuit, clad only in the white bootslacks and pale blue vest she’d worn to dinner. The vest was open in front, secured only by a silver cord just above her breasts and sheer enough that even in this dim light Dev could make out the oval duskiness of her nipples showing underneath. Though the material contained the same microcircuitry for thermal control as did Dev’s bodysuit, the costume exposed a fair amount of skin and the Heraklean night was distinctly chilly.

  “You want to go back inside?”

  “No. I want… want to linger here. To enjoy Starrise. And you.”

  An hour passed, the heavens wheeling slowly. West, the zodiacal light was fading. East, however, the sky glowed red and pale gray through a band of clouds hugging the horizon, as though with the light of approaching dawn. Minutes passed in long silence, the east growing slowly lighter. Then the clouds vanished and the false dawn was revealed for what it was. Bright, brighter by far than Zeta Herculis, the dazzling star cleared the eastern horizon and touched mountain peaks with blue and silver.

  From Mu Herculis, Vega lay but three and a half light-years distant, a diamond-hard, blue-white beacon outshining everything in the sky, bright enough to read by, bright enough to cast distinct shadows on the ground and drown the night’s other stars in glorious luminosity.

  But Katya was looking north, toward the dimly seen bulk of the atmosphere generator.

  “Dev…”

  “Don’t, Katya.” He knew what she was thinking, what she was about to say. “Let’s just say it’s orders—”

  “Orders!” Her anger flared, and he felt her tense beneath his arm. “How much death have orders caused already?”

  “All right.Duty, then.”

  “That’s worse. I could be the one going down into the Xeno’s lair tomorrow, as well as you.”

  “Could be, but I’d rather that it was me and Vic. You had the last go-round, on Eridu, and it nearly killed you.”

  “I remember. How could I forget? But Dev… Love… I don’t want to lose you. Not now. I feel like you’re all I have left.”

  The words were at once joy and sadness. She loved him! As he, with newfound certainty, loved her. And yet…

  “One of us has to go,” he said reasonably. “We’ve had the most experience with the Xenos, you and I, and we can’t both go, not when we might… uh, might have to make a second try.”

  She turned suddenly inside the reach of his arm, putting her own arms around him, embracing him tightly. Bright, Cameron, he thought to himself savagely as he hugged her back. Real bright. Just the right thing to say!

  After a time, she pulled back. Her wet face glistened in the luminous diamond glare of Vega.

  “It doesn’t matter which of us goes, does it?” she asked. “Let me.”

  “You still have trouble with enclosed places, Katya.” He said it bluntly, saw the pain at the truth in her eyes. “General Sinclair knows that too. He probably thought it would go better if the first person to make contact didn’t have… other things on her mind.”

  “Maybe. I’m beginning to think Travis Sinclair is a cold, hard man. An AI programmed for political philosophy and military tactics.”

  “Because he didn’t let you stay behind on New America? You can do a hell of a lot more good here. Besides, wouldn’t you rather be here with me?”

  The attempted lightness fell flat. “I don’t know what I want, Dev. Not anymore. I used to think the rebellion was everything, that it was my reason for being alive. Maybe it still would be, if I wasn’t always seeing people I cared for being sent off to face Imperials or Xenos or God knows what while I’m ordered to safety. I used to think I was doing something, that I was making a difference, somehow. Now I’m beginning to think the Nagas have the right idea. Everything is Self and not-Self, Here or not-Here. What you are and where you are’re all that matter, and nothing else and nobody else in the universe is worth a two-byte download.”

  “Delete that,” Dev said. “You’ve got bad data there. Besides, I always had the feeling that the Nagas were missing some of the subtleties of life.”

  “What… do you mean?”

  “Have you noticed, when you’re linked with one, how ordinary rock takes on a complexity you never noticed before?”

  “Yes.…”

  “It’s all Rock and not-Rock, sure, but the rock takes on a, I don’t know, a flavor you never noticed before. It seems to be tied in with the direction and intensity of the local magnetic fie
ld, the temperature, the actual chemical composition of the rock, lots of things I can’t even put names to.”

  “The Nagas have senses we can’t even understand,” Katya said. “It only makes sense they’d be aware of things that we’re not.”

  “Exactly. But the same is true, the other way around. A Naga misses an awful lot that might seem obvious to us.” He drew closer, tipping her head back with a finger beneath her chin. “Things like this.”

  A long time later, they broke the kiss. “Still want to think like a Naga?”

  “Mmm. No. I never did, not really. That was just… me. I tend to charge off sometimes before that little DATA TRANSFER COMPLETE sign winks on. God, Dev, you be careful down there tomorrow, okay?”

  “I will. Remember, each time we’ve run into wild Xenos in the past, they haven’t reacted much to our presence, have let us get right up next to them, in fact. I’m not even sure they’re aware of us at all, save maybe as some sort of natural phenomena, moving rocks, or something. Certainly, they don’t have the same sense of personal space we do, or the flight-or-fight-if-you’re-too-close response of most Earth-born critters. Their evolution must never have included things like a nasty predator sneaking up too close, or an unpleasant neighbor who might whack you over the head with a club and drop you in the stewpot.”

  “Nagas don’t have a head to whack.”

  “True enough. And it’d take a damned big pot to hold one. But you get the idea.”

  Katya was silent for a long time after that. “Dev?” she asked finally.

  “Yeah?”

  “What good’s it going to do, anyway?”

  “What?”

  “Talking with the Nagas.”

  “You mean besides convincing them not to eat us? To leave our cities and stuff alone?”

  “Well, that much is obvious.” Despite her mood, she smiled. “But Sinclair is fixed on this idea of his for enlisting the Nagas, the DalRiss too, for that matter, as allies. I’ve spent a lot of the past few weeks wondering just what good such allies would do. Dev, the Nagas don’t even understand the concept ‘enemy.’ For all that they’ve pushed us off one world after another over the past forty-some years, they don’t understand the idea of ‘war.’ Hell, Fred just barely understands the idea of multiple individuals—that’s what we want him to communicate to the Heraklean Naga, after all—and I think the idea of one individual killing another must he as alien to it as, as, I don’t know. As a Naga’s ideas about the shape of the universe are to us.”