by Ian Douglas
No wonder the Imperial War Staff had been baffled.
Hell, there was so much about them humans didn't know. He relaxed slightly, still watchful but unwilling to start the fight. He would wait and see what this crowd did.
Yes, they were definitely reacting to the strider's presence, sliding toward it, but very, very slowly. He cut the Ghostrider's external lights, but it didn't seem to make any difference. Dev nodded to himself. He'd begun to suspect that the creatures were reacting to heat rather than light, and his experiment confirmed that. There were no eyes on the things that he could see, no organs of sight . . . unless the whole translucent glob was photosensitive, and he did not think that that was the case.
Okay, the critters were thermovores, heat-eaters. His strider had blasted the cavern with a hell of a lot of heat when it fired its jets, so much so that his strider's AI was battling to dump excess heat into the surrounding air, which was quite a bit hotter than the strider's vents. Outside temperature . . . fifty-one Celsius.
It occurred to Dev that the heat plume he'd seen earlier was not waste heat from industrial processes, but a means of planetary engineering on as large a scale as the attempts to remake Loki's atmosphere. These creatures liked heat. Maybe that was the reasoning behind those giant tunnels, a system for bringing heat from deep within the planet's interior to the surface. The excretions on the surface of GhegnuRish certainly seemed designed to catch sunlight, possibly for the purpose of transforming it into heat.
He wondered if cold might be an effective weapon, then abandoned that line of thought. He'd seen these creatures blindly questing on the surface of Loki, where the air temperature hovered at thirty to fifty below. Hardly a choice environment for a life-form that lived off heat.
There was a way to find out once and for all . . . possibly.
Communication.
The DalRiss Lifemasters aboard the Darwin claimed that the new Translators they'd engineered would be able to bridge the communication gap between a human cephlink implant and the Xenophobes. A special, newly devised program designed to facilitate that communication had been downloaded into Dev's RAM before the drop, and his orders were to try to use it if the opportunity presented itself. This, Dev thought unhappily, was certainly an opportunity.
There was only one hitch. The Translator had to establish physical contact with both Dev and the Xeno. To use the damned thing, he was going to have to break linkage and leave the protection of his strider, walk out there, and touch the goking things.
That might not be as much of a problem if the Xenos were bubbling masses of grease blobs and jelly lying in the open shell of a travel pod. But this! . . .
Switching his external lights back on, he continued to scan the Xenophobes outside. There were thousands of them, stretched across every surface he could see. The one thing going for him was that none of the Xenophobes was wearing armor. If a stalker or even a Gamma appeared down here, he wouldn't have a chance.
Dev thought about leaving the relative security of Morgan's Hold, and shuddered inwardly. He remembered his trek across that flame-blasted battlefield on Loki, unprotected, alone. He remembered the battle outside the Warlord, and the terror and pain when the Gamma had grabbed his ankle.
"Well," he told the encircling creatures, speaking aloud. "We could just sit and stare at each other for the rest of the week while you soak up my lights."
There was no reply, of course. The amorphous forms were definitely closer now.
No choice, he thought. I'll just have to meet them on their terms.
Silently he ran through the list of mental commands that would break the link. Abruptly he was lying in the cramped and stifling dark, his body protesting with the usual postjack list of aches and pains and stiff-muscled complaint as he pulled the VCH from his head and unjacked the feeds.
For an instant he was deaf, dumb, and blind to the universe. Then he was awake, alone inside the cramped and ill-smelling claustrophobia of the Ghostrider's command module. The heat was oppressive. It was like sitting in an oven, and he could scarcely breathe. In seconds he was bathed in sweat, reeking of fear and exertion.
Fumbling for the pressure latch of an equipment locker, he opened it and extracted a gas mask. He wished he could wear an E-suit helmet, but even with positive pressure from his PLSS feeds, atmospheric carbon dioxide could still diffuse into his helmet air, and even a tiny rise in his CO2 partial pressure could cause unconsciousness, then death. He slipped the mask on, pressed the seals against his face, and tested the airflow.
Good. It was easier to breathe now.
He thought about the horrors waiting just outside the strider's hull, and nearly balked.
Akumu. The Nihongo word meant nightmare, and this was Dev's own, very personal nightmare, to step outside the protection of artificial armor, exposed, vulnerable.
Reaching into the equipment locker, he extracted a gleaming canister. Touching the seals, he broke it in two, spilling the formless blob of gray jelly within onto his stomach. It looked very much like the things plastered over the cavern walls outside. With some distaste—he still hadn't gotten used to the feel of these things—he pressed the fingers of his bare right hand into the mass. Slowly the amoebic mass began oozing up his fingers, coating the back of his hand, then trickling around his wrist and across his palm. In a few moments his hand was encased in what looked and felt like a glistening wet, translucent gray rubber glove, with an ugly, gray-brown mass clinging to his forearm.
Careful not to bump the cornel, he untangled himself from the webbing. As he lifted his arm, he caught sight of the artificial symbiont by the faint light of his console, and smiled. His hand and arm felt cooler now; the cornel, like the Xenophobes outside, was a thermovore. It was feeding on the heat of Dev's body.
"Okay, fella," he said. "We're about to find out if you live up to your billing. I sure hope you can speak the natives' language. . . ."
Dev reached up and cracked the commander's access hatch.
Chapter 33
Dreams, fecund musings,
Reality in the world
I shape for myself.
—Imperial haiku,
mid-twenty-fifth century
Katya caught herself with one hand as she started to swing, the buckythread suspending her from her harness like a spider on the end of a very long strand of webbing. Buckythread—a nanosynthesized single-chain molecule made of carbon atoms linked together in a very long, geodesic tube—was immensely strong, stronger than diamond fiber, so strong that to cut it required the application of specially programmed nano to disassemble the carbon-carbon bonds. There was no danger that the thread would break and send her plunging into the well.
It wasn't the danger of falling, however, that threatened her. It was the enveloping blackness, imperfectly dispelled by the lamp clipped to her helmet, and the closeness of her surroundings, made smaller by the dark and by her own adrenaline-charged apprehensions.
Secured to the prow of the parked and anchored Crab, her cable was playing out from a small spool attached to her harness. Keeping one hand on the spool's pressure plate, she was able to control the speed of her descent. She felt clumsy, though, and the four bobbing lights below her feet proved that Dev's Commandos were a lot better at this than she was. One boot caught on a projection, knocking her sideways. She swung in a dizzying arc, returned, and crashed her shoulder painfully against the wall. Her subgun jammed against her hip and the weight of her PLSS hanging from her back. She stopped her descent, steadied herself, adjusted her harness and weapon, then began the descent again.
She was blind . . . as blind as she'd been hanging in the Dark between worlds years before. The knowledge that she could still see . . . the half circle of light overhead, the four bobbing helmet lights of her companions below . . . could not banish the fear of that palpable night.
Worse, though, was the knowledge that the Xenophobes might be all around her, hidden in the dark. Nightmares she'd had as a child, imagined monsters in
the shadows, returned with vivid force and reality.
But she kept her hand on the spool's touchpoint, lowering herself steadily into the depths. She was getting the hang of the thing now, controlling her descent with gentle kicks off the wall.
Somehow, she kept the monsters at bay.
Chapter 34
Even the most alien of beings, though, must share some definite perceptual biases, understandings, stimuli, even emotions. If it doesn't, communication is impossible and demonstration of sentient self-awareness is impossible.
I wonder if that hasn't been our problem with the Xenophobes all along. Perhaps the one emotion we have in common with them is fear.
—Dr. Paul Hernandez
Hearings on the DalRiss,
Terran Hegemony Space Council,
C.E. 2542
The heat inside the strider had been bad. Outside, it was like a furnace. Dev clung to the open hatchway, head reeling, before he managed to release the ladder and start down the rungs. The Ghostrider's lights illuminated a tiny world of silver light and slick-surfaced, slow-gliding Xenos. Elsewhere was blackness.
The ground felt slick beneath his feet. Looking down, he saw he was standing on a thin layer of jelly—Xeno cells smeared by the Ghostrider's foot when he'd righted it after the fall.
Careful of each step, he approached the nearest wall, right hand out. He could feel the cornel quivering against the flesh of his forearm, as though in anticipation.
What would it be like, communicating with the Xenophobes? With the DalRiss, he'd simply heard their voice inside his head, thanks to the cornel's translation and the interface through his link. But the Xenos were different enough to make DalRiss and humans look like brothers. Dev didn't know what to expect.
He placed his gloved hand against the wall, bringing the cornel into direct contact with the glistening mass of Xeno cells layered across the rock in their veneer of translucent jelly.
Threat . . . fear . . . threat . . . but the invader looked nothing like the dimly remembered Selves-that-were-Not-Self that had vanished from the world so very long ago. The Self moved with crippling slowness; the speed of its thought was the speed of microelectronic circuitry and relays, of individual switching units the size of single molecules. But movement, reaction, the dim memories of old fears and drives and needs, were slowed a billionfold by the inefficiencies of the Self's haphazard design. The One could think very quickly when it had something to think about, but its reactions were painfully slow.
Curiosity. Fear. The Not-Self had approached, was touching one subunit of the Self. The One prepared to discard the subunit to avoid contamination, yet in a shock of awareness, Self and Not-Self were merging, blending, communicating at blinding speed. The electronic currents that passed for thoughts, currents describing mode and existence and being and memory, had been picked up by the Not-Self and returned, and when they returned, they brought . . . images.
Dev felt the alien thoughts, a flood surging through his skull, a cascade of images, concepts, strangeness . . . seeing heat and equating it with comfort and completeness, understanding space as the taste of Self crowded unit by unit into an unimaginable body that laced through a million kilometers of tunnels riddling the planetary crust from the chill void of the inner surface to the warm glow of the outer fires, spanning the globe . . . no . . . the universe . . . a hollow shell . . . inside out . . .
He struggled to understand, to comprehend, fighting a sluggish mental vertigo that threatened to turn his world inside out. It was like rebirth; worse, it was as though everything he'd ever learned in his life was wrong, wrong, wrong and he had to learn everything anew.
The universe is Rock, endless Rock going on forever, surrounded by warmth. Somewhere deep within the Rock and far away from the warmth, there is Not-Rock, Void, an immense bubble of emptiness pervaded by strange phenomena, by heat that fluctuates according to a seemingly meaningless pattern, a heat source that seems unreachable, violating any reasonable hypothesis of the universe.
The One would be content to remain close to the surrounding warmth, but the compulsion remains to seek the Void and the warmth beyond the Void and populate it with extensions of the One.
But from the Void come the Not-Self units that do not obey any laws at all, but that disrupt the One and seek its destruction, but these become part of the One, turned to good. . . .
Dev tried to clear his mind, staggered by the data flowing through it from outside. And there was more, echoes in the thunder in his brain.
I always wanted to be a star pilot, wanted it so bad, it hurt. I remember the summer Mom and I went to see Dad off when he went up the sky-el on his way to the Imperial Palace and his new job. The sky-el is anchored on a promontory on the north coast of Pulau Lingga, a forty-kilometer island smack on the equator a hundred kilometers southeast of Singapore proper, and you reach it by tube magtrains that run beneath the waters of the strait. Sometimes you can see the sky-el from Singapore, a thread-thin vertical scratch against the sky that catches the sun with a silver gleam just after sunrise, like sunlight on a strand of spider's silk.
The place to really see it is from the visitors' gallery close by where the magtrains unload, but the gallery was closed that day and all I could do was cling to the wire mesh fence that closed off the service access areas from the public and look up and up and up and up at that silver tower arrowing into the zenith and know that that tower is the first step on the road to the stars and that's where I want to go, into the Galaxy and out among the stars and bathed in the blue glory of the godsea and when will I see Dad again and why does it hurt so much, oh God—
Dev knew he was rambling in his thoughts but couldn't stop, as the pain and fear of years were released as though by the smashing of a dam, a cascade of feeling and memory.
His hurt when his father left, the betrayal. The agony when he learned his father was dead and that there could never be reconciliation. His frustration at losing his chance to be a starpilot, the humiliation of being consigned to the enlisted ranks . . .
. . . and the warm and easy camaraderie of yujo, the warrior's bond, a new family, acceptance, self-mastery, victory . . .
My God, he thought, shaken by the intensity within himself that he'd never known was there. What's the Xeno think of all of this?
He heard an answer, though not in words. The two sets of experiences and backgrounds and worldviews, his and the One's, were too mutually alien. But he could sense the Xenophobe's intense curiosity, could sense questions streaming through his awareness like the systems readout when he was linked to his strider. . . .
What is mesh fence?
What is island?
What is sunlight?
What is planet?
What is stars?
What is God?
And more, many more. He could sense that the Mind behind those questions was very large and very, very old, that it was cycling through what it had sensed in Dev's uncontrolled rush of thoughts with the speed of a supercomputer, matching words with images, concepts with understanding. It was fast, but hampered by its own perceptions. Dev had glimpsed some of those twists and recoiled, unable to comprehend them.
But memories continued to surface. Dev had just experienced a direct RAM feed. There was new data in his permanent memory, like the note passed to him by Katya, but containing files and files of uncounted millions of bytes of memory.
All he had to do was . . . remember.
He remembered being a Child of the Night, half-formed, knowing warmth and darkness and the taste of brothers. He remembered before that, crossing the Inner Void in a tiny sphere flung from the Rock at some unimaginably distant time in the past. He remembered . . .
Dev knew what the Xenophobes—
No, not Xenophobes. That was human misperception, born of fear and ignorance. They did not fear strangers; they simply did not know them, did not recognize them as a part of the universe not bound up with Self.
They, it . . . was the One, all there
was in a universe that held no One else.
A clatter of falling rocks sounded twenty meters behind him. Dev half turned in time to see rubble spilling across the crouched form of Morgan's Hold, like some huge, motionless crustacean dimly visible behind the four-eyed glare of its lights and the swirling dust. Seconds later, four figures descended through the misty light and dropped to the ground at the Ghostrider's side, two men and two women in black and red combat armor hitting the releases on their harnesses and unslinging their weapons in one smooth movement.
"Lieutenant Cameron!" Sergeant Wilkins advanced on him like an avenging Valkyrie, a vicious-looking Steyr-Hitachi submachine gun in her hands. "Oh my God, what's it done to you? . . . "
Behind her, Corporal Bayer raised a hand torch as the other two unslung their sleekly vicious-looking Toshiba laser rifles, but hesitated, uncertain where to direct their fire.
Dev blinked against the light, suddenly aware that he was still standing next to the cavern wall, aware that the One had flowed down to engulf almost half of his entire body, as more and more of the One's subunits moved in to make contact through the cornel. With a sudden twist of insight, he realized that he must look like part of this living wall. There was no pain, no compulsion.
Merely . . . Oneness.
"Hello, Sarge." His voice sounded strange, muffled by the mask over his face. Dev almost couldn't trust himself to speak. The images, the thoughts . . . Strangeness still galloped through his skull, threatening to trample him into the ground. "Don't shoot. It hasn't hurt me. I'm okay . . . really okay. . . ."
Reluctantly he pulled himself free from the wall with a wet, sucking sound. The cornel remained with him, trembling gently against his bare skin. The One had felt cool where it touched him. The heat of the cavern washed over him again like a hot blast from an oven.
With another, louder clatter, a fifth figure descended into view, legs kicking at the wall. Dev's eyes widened with surprise. This figure was clad in black skintights and wore an E-suit helmet.