Warstrider: Jackers (Warstrider Series, Book Three)

by Ian Douglas

  "Affirmative," Dev replied. The same data was accessible within his virtual imagery, but he scarcely glanced at it. "I'll be glad when we hit bottom. I feel like I'm crawling around in somebody's large intestine."

  "I'm linked with you there."

  "Katya?" Dev called. "Are you still with us?"

  "We're here, Dev." Her voice was hard and tight and edged with a crackling burr of static. The two striders had been leaving a trail of communications relays as they descended, but so much rock still swallowed both radio and laser carriers, and so many communications links amplified inefficiencies. No one knew how long the two striders descending into Herakles's bowels would remain in contact with their fellows on the surface.

  Surely it was his imagination, but Dev could almost sense the weight of the artificial mountain pressing down on him from above. That mountain, and the other atmosphere generation plants, had been grown by programmed nano that had excavated thousands of tunnels like this one deep into the crust of the planet, transporting the rock up to the surface literally molecule by molecule, where it was rearranged into the unyielding fabricrete and duralloy and ferrocarb of the mountain itself, and its internal mechanisms. Those empty tunnels had been left behind, becoming part of the atmospheric nanogenerator's circulation system and a means of storing pure gases—oxygen or nitrogen—until enough had been accumulated that they could be released in the proper ratios.

  And now, those seemingly endless nano-drilled tunnels had a new use.

  There was Rock . . . and not-Rock, Self and not-Self, a universe described in the dualistic is/is-not of an evolution shaped by absolutes. The dichotomy of being was simple and self-evident. Physical form could be described as Rock, infinite in extent, near infinite in its subtle variability and composition and chemistries at both super-and submolecular levels. Not-Rock was all else, the channels and chambers and node-enclosures of thin, near-vacuum that housed and enclosed and sheltered Self.

  Mental form—awareness, consciousness, ego, thought, volition, action—was Self, though here the simplistic dualism of being and not-being, of yes and no, grew rapidly more complex. Once, perhaps, though the memories were hazy now with the endless march of intervening events, Self had simply been Self, but even Self could change. Indeed, Self measured the difference between Self and Rock not only in its capacity to sense, store data, and reason, but in its capacity for change, deliberate or otherwise. It had learned, incalculable numbers of events past, how to pinch off a minute fraction of its own being, tiny localizations of purpose and will distinct from Self, a thinking and sensing awareness that was not Self, but >>self<<.

  The discovery of >>self<< was arguably the most important step in the evolution of Self, a means to reach out into the surrounding darkness and warmth of Mother Rock and gather experience, memories, even samples of the Rock beyond the Here of Self. A >>self<< would set forth, sundered from Self, keening the sharp pains of loneliness and loss. No longer Self, its experience of the universe was not immediately accessible, could not be accessible until the >>self<< returned to Self, was reabsorbed into a larger being and a more complete awareness and its memories commingled with the whole. The philosophical implications were staggering. Could there actually be experience—events, awareness, change, the stuff of memories—taking place in the universe beyond the grasp of Self?

  Astonishing as the implications were, experience with countless billions of >>selves<< had proven this to be the case. There was Being outside of Self and more to the universe than an infinite sea of Rock. There was Here—where Self was—and there was not-Here. Events could transpire within a seemingly infinite not-Here, a process that defied all that Self had thought it knew and understood.

  Self had still been grappling with the concept when it had encountered the Burning.

  From what Dev and Katya been able to learn from the planetary Nagas on the DalRiss homeworld of Alya B-V and on Eridu, Nagas began as small nodes of interconnected supracells deep within a planet's crust, planted there by the arrival of a Naga reproductive pod riding the world's magnetic fields down from space. With millions of nanotechnic organelles existing in symbiosis with each supracell's organic components, the creatures were able to hollow out pockets and passageways within solid rock, in much the same way as the terraformers had programmed the nano that had delved these tunnels beneath the atmosphere generators.

  The devoured rock became raw material for new supracells, organic and inorganic components alike drawn from the world's inner treasure troves of silicon, oxygen, carbon, iron, nickel, and every other common element. The building blocks of a world, after all, and the building blocks for a living creature were all much the same, differing only in their ratios and in the manner of their arrangement.

  For perhaps hundreds of millions of years, the Naga nodes tunneled and reproduced. Thermovores, they made use of the planet's internal heat, utilizing the energy to metabolize the rock literally molecule by molecule. Pockets or veins of pure metal ores or other substances were best, requiring less energy to extract them.

  Eventually, the Nagas occupied much of the planetary crust, from just beneath the surface to that depth where heat and pressure exceeded their tolerance levels. Possessing numerous senses understood dimly by humans, if at all, they were able to detect large concentrations of pure substances at considerable distances, even through solid rock. To a Naga node, a human city, even a single warstrider, represented an incredible bounty of pure metals, polymers, and ceramics, of pure diamond woven into thin, readily accessible sheets, of vast numbers of nanotechnic machines the size of single, large molecules ready for assimilation and reprogramming. As the first Naga scouts neared the surface of a world occupied by humans, they were drawn to these concentrations of raw materials. Unaware that the delicate carbon-based life-forms in their way were anything other than some strangely patterned natural phenomena, the scouts began to feed. . . .

  Which, of course, had been interpreted by humans as an attack by monstrous, alien, and utterly incomprehensible foes.

  On Alya B-V, the DalRiss had been forced to evacuate their own birthworld as the Nagas emerged everywhere, transforming cities, the surface of entire continents into nightmare fantasies shaped by alien notions of line and form and function. In time, countless separate nodes had united, until every supracell on and in the world was interlinked, neurons of a single, vast brain of incomprehensible scope. At that point, the organism changed, its drives shifting from those of the restless, acquisitive phase to the sessile—and reproductive—contemplative form.

  So much was known about the Naga, communicated by the now "tame" organism inhabiting Eridu through the intermediate agency of a living DalRiss comel. So much more was mystery still. What triggered the transition from the acquisitive to the contemplative phases? How long did it take? Xenophobe notions of time bore no relationship at all to those of humans; indeed, time seemed to mean little to organisms that possessed memories—and oddly packaged and disordered memories at that—stretching back for hundreds of millions or even billions of years and embracing long chains of successive worlds.

  The question had taken on a fairly pressing, new importance on Mu Herculis. Twenty-eight years ago, the first Xenophobe scouts had emerged from underground and begun devouring human settlements. Three decades was the flicker of an eye compared to the time spans enjoyed by the Nagas, but when the organisms began breaking through to the, to them, alien surface of a world, that seemed to be a sign that the transformation was close at hand. When Dev had settled on Mu Herculis III as the place to conduct this communications experiment, he'd based the choice at least in part on the hope that the Heraklean Naga had settled down, beginning the change from the acquisitive to the contemplative phase. The Naga he'd communicated with on Alya B-V had been contemplative; the one on Eridu that Katya had encountered had still been acquisitive, but on the verge of making the change, with most of its nodes already interconnected with one another and its group intelligence already of a fantasticall
y high order.

  But in twenty-eight years, the Naga occupying the Heraklean crust had not shown itself since the day Argos had vanished in a sea of nuclear fire. A careful, almost kilometer by kilometer search of the planetary surface from orbit had shown no trace of the organism.

  It was entirely possible that the thing was dead. Not likely, certainly, given that an organism that occupied much of a planet's crust massed as much as a fair-sized moon, but it was possible. If the Xenophobes attacking the Heraklean colony had been a single, relatively young node that had been located by chance near Argos, then the entire node could have been destroyed by the nuclear blast that had so altered the shape of the Augean Peninsula.

  But Dev didn't think that likely. A planet is so vast a place, the coincidence of Man and Xenophobe both beginning their colonizations from the same point and at very nearly the same time was too great to consider seriously.

  And yet . . . where was the Heraklean Naga now? Automated probes—AI landers bearing sensitive instruments capable of tracking a Xeno's DSA, the Deep Seismic Anomaly associated with its movements far underground—had set down by the hundreds on every continent and major island on the planet. In two months they'd heard nothing save for the purely natural groanings and rumblings of a living planet's internal workings.

  And so, Dev and Vic had decided that they would have to continue the search in a more direct fashion. The empty tunnels beneath an atmospheric nanogenerator penetrated the planet's crust to a depth of one or two kilometers in places, far enough down that the temperature reached seventy degrees or more, rising twenty-five degrees Celsius for every kilometer's drop in depth.

  Surely the Nagas, with their singleminded hunger for pure metals and manufactured composites would have sought out the artificial mountains of the atmosphere plants, at least so far as to explore them. The mountain pressing down on Dev now was Heraklean Atmospheric Nanoprocessing Facility One, the closest of all of the planet's terraforming plants to the place where Argos had stood. The Xenos must have penetrated the place, at least as far as these tunnels.

  Dev could imagine no other way of reaching the Naga than to penetrate the tunnels' lower reaches. The only problem he could see was one that had been haunting him for some time now.

  Assuming there were still living Nagas within Herakles, their lack of activity was atypical . . . and therefore potentially dangerous. Quite possibly the planet's inhabitants were being quiet because they didn't care to receive visitors.

  Self was well aware of the not-Selves approaching from the place-of-Burning. It still had trouble accepting the distinctly alien idea of a not-Self that seemed to exhibit the volition, the sense of purpose that ought to be Self's alone. It could best accept the not-Selves' existence by thinking of them as a kind of >>selves<<, as disembodied parts of Self momentarily sundered from the whole. This explained the purposefulness of their advance as well as the tastes of pure metal and functioning submicroscopic units, of tightly channeled electrical and magnetic fields, of other-than-natural heat radiation that they bore on and within their curiously formed beings.

  How, though, could there be >>selves<< that had not arisen by the direct volition and action of Self? That was a question unanswered, and possibly unanswerable.

  Normally, of course, it would have been simple enough to absorb them into the whole, assimilating their memories of events from beyond Here and Self, but the memory of the Burning, and the driving need for survival that was indelibly printed within every one of Self's composite units, made it hesitate.

  It could not face the agonizing pain and loss of Burning again.

  "Dev?"

  "Yeah, Vic."

  "My sonar is picking up something funny up ahead. I think the main tunnel dead-ends . . . but the returns are, I don't know. Soft."

  "Yeah, I read the same. It might be what we're looking for."

  For the last several kilometers, he'd been aware that the tunnel they were traversing had changed in character. It continued to descend at a ten-degree slope, and the lumen had neither narrowed nor enlarged. Still, human-programmed mining nano tended to leave a smooth and crisply defined, neatly geometrical surface, one given a denser composition than normal rock in order to support the tunnel roof. The tunnel walls now were slightly irregular, with a surface that appeared to have been altered by restructuring native rock into a slightly translucent, crystalline structure, obviously for the same reason.

  This section of the tunnel had been eaten out not by human agencies, but by Nagas.

  "Maybe we should just unwrap Fred and send him ahead, huh?"

  Dev had been considering that for some minutes now. The trouble was that there was no way of predicting what Fred would do once he was released. Better to make sure they were face-to-face—if you could even use such anthropocentric imagery here—with the Naga.

  "Let's wait," he told Hagan. "We haven't been attacked yet. Let's see if we can get closer."

  "You're the boss. I make the range to be a little less than a kilometer, now."

  "Let's just hope the tunnel doesn't tighten up," Dev replied. "I'm beginning to wonder if we'll even be able to turn around in here."

  "Yeah. Anything bad happens, we're going to have to back up real, real fast."

  Change, or rather, the capacity to experience change, defined Self, separating it from unchanging Rock.

  Or, to be more specific still, the capability to deliberately inflict as well as to contemplate change was what separated Self from its surroundings. Rock could change, becoming not-Rock, but that was a direct result of Self's volition. Self absorbed rock, changing its components at need to generate additional Self. Rock did not, could not, change of its own accord.

  Change, as directed by Self, was all that made existence worthwhile. Consider the boredom of an infinite and infinitely unchanging universe!

  Once, then, Self had gloried in change. Since the Burning, however, the need for change had itself changed. The Burning had brought pain, loneliness, loss . . . and an abiding fear, almost as though Self itself had been pinched off to become a sharply limited and delimited >>self<<. These sensations and the associated memories were now part of Self's universe, and they shaped its perceptions of all that lay beyond the truncated and flame-seared boundary between Self and not-Self.

  Immediately before the Burning, Self had become aware—through the agency of numerous >>selves<<— of the bizarrely alien not-Selves and not->>selves<< that were now approaching Here. Incompletely understood, these alien not-Selves had once been understood as a special category of Rock, something natural and preexistent, but which sometimes seemingly acted with volition. Self had sought them out, partly curious, though mostly their apparent relationship with vast troves of unimaginably pure and very special and useful subsets of Rock was what had intrigued.

  Intriguing, too, had been the number of >>selves<< that never returned for reabsorption after being dispatched to sample these alien >>selves<<. Why? This growing uncertainty about the nature of the alien >>selves<< had been in the forefront of Self's introspective awareness when the Burning had flamed across being, vaporizing untold trillions of Self's composite units. Perhaps as much as a tenth of Self's substance had ceased to be, had become not-Self and, in the becoming, had transmitted sensory images that could still, upon reflection, make Self's being shudder in remembered agony.

  How to avoid a repeat of the Burning now dominated Self's awareness. As the alien >>selves<< neared Here, Self could conceive of only two alternatives. It could retreat, as it had in the aftermath of the Burning, finding shelter in deeper and more secure embraces of Mother Rock. Comfortable as that thought was, it offered few advantages, for the not->>selves<< were clearly capable of following Self wherever it might go.

  Which left, of course, only a single, viable alternative, risky as that might be. . . .

  Chapter 23

  Our modern perspective reveals that the Xenophobe Wars were, in fact, a terrible accident, one brought about by the fact that
neither side in the conflict had any clear idea about the true nature of the enemy. Humans perceived only the Xeno travellers and combat mode fighters, alien monstrosities obeying alien imperatives and wreaking utter devastation wherever they appeared. The Xenophobes, we now understand, perceived us as part of the background, if at all, as a kind of natural phenomenon that could be dangerous and which had to be assimilated, neutralized, or adapted to.

  —The Xenophobe Wars

  Dr. Francine Torrey

  C.E. 2543

  "Vic!" Dev snapped, every sense almost painfully taut. "Do you see it? Do you see it?"

  "Affirmative." Hagan's view forward from his own warstrider was blocked by the hull of Dev's machine, but he was getting a visual feed from Dev's RLN-90. "My God, there's a lot of it, isn't there?"

  "The tip of the iceberg," Dev replied, wonderingly. "Worse. If this thing was a human, we'd be a couple of bacteria staring at the very end of its little toe."

  The tunnel they'd been descending debouched on a vast cavern; so sudden had been its appearance that Dev had nearly plunged forward off the tunnel's edge and into that vault of primal blackness. The spotlights on Dev's Scoutstrider filled much of that cavern without illuminating it, for the far walls and the unseen floor of the pit were filled with a glistening, opalescent black substance in constant, queasy motion. Too lumpy to be oil or some similar liquid, the light-drinking surface was wetly uneven, composed of thousands of closely packed Naga supracells that slid over and around one another with the slick, mucoid lubrication of certain Terran gastropods. Each was connected to its neighbors by innumerable tendrils, like the axons and dendrites of human nerve cells, save that these were in direct contact with one another.

  Too, these were moving, unlike nerve tissue. Dev had the impression that he was staring down into a living sea, one with currents and waves, but ponderously slow.