by Ian Douglas
A month after that first Xeno surfacing just outside the capital's domes, a second had occurred twenty-eight kilometers west of the sky-el and had been destroyed by Babel militia striders rushed to the spot. The 3rd New American Mech Cav had been hurriedly shifted back to Babel to defend against the expected next attack. RoPro walls had been grown, and the robotic defenses put in place. Xenophobes tended to use the same exits from their subterranean highways repeatedly.
That next attack had not materialized, however, until now. For several days, every military unit on Eridu had been on full alert as HEMILCOM tracked the SDTs of Xenophobe Alphas far underground. By the previous evening, it had been a fair certainty that the Xenos would be emerging, and soon, at Red One. Imperial Marines were already being routed to the Babel towerdown, both from other Eriduan cities and from orbit; Xenophobes seemed to be attracted to large masses of metal or artificial composites, and by far the largest such mass on the planet was the towering silver needle of the Babel sky-el. A successful Xeno attack on the space elevator would spell disaster on a cataclysmic scale. Unfortunately, from Babel's point of view, nukes could not be employed this time. No one wanted to even think about the results if subsurface nukes severed the space elevator's underground anchors.
As they'd skimmed above the Eriduan Outback toward their drop zone, Katya had listened in on fragments of communication between the ground forces and HEMILCOM. She'd heard the announcement that eight Hegemony striders had landed and were engaging the enemy; minutes later she'd heard the order to fall back. From the sound of things, the Xenos had been left holding the field around Red One. There'd been a call sent out for warships to bombard the crater from orbit; many worlds had large laser batteries mounted in their synchorbital installations, but the only heavy weapons in Eridu orbit at the moment were those of the Imperial destroyer Tokitukaze, and those would be employed only as a tactic of last resort. Reportedly, Omigato had already requested both additional warships and more warstrider units to bolster Eridu's defenses, but it might be weeks before those reinforcements arrived.
According to Katya's topo download. Henson's Rise passed the Red One crater less than a kilometer to the west. The human defenses would have concentrated on the crater's east side, and the retreat would have been toward the east, toward Babel. It was Katya's plan to move along the crest of the ridge to a point where she could observe the crater itself from above and from the west. No decision about actually attempting to approach the Xenos would be made until she had a clear view of the battlefield.
"Watch it, boss," Hagan called to her over the tactical link. "I think the trees are thinning up ahead. We're almost there."
"Roger that." Her Ghostrider was in the lead, weapons already armed and ready. "I'm starting to get a background nano count. Point oh-two and rising."
"Affirmative. There's some fog up ahead."
It looked like a harmless mist, and the nano count was still low enough that it might be harmless in fact. The viscous white gas that accompanied nano breakthroughs was actually a waste product, nano-D already rendered harmless by their submicroscopic mouthfuls of disassembled matter. The real danger, live nano-D, was visible only through the electronic senses of warstriders and battlefield scanners.
Some of the nearest mushroom trees, Katya noticed, were brown and straggly looking, with long shreds of bark hanging from cancerous-looking patches on their trunks. The forest here was already dying, brushed by the Xenos' nanotechnic touch. Katya pressed forward.
"Captain?" Lipinski called from the Ghostrider's second slot. The decision had finally been made that she would keep her Hegemony rank, at least for now. "We're picking up something weird on UHF."
"Let's hear it."
Static crashed in her mind, overlaying a reedy, almost plaintive warble of harmonics. It was a familiar tune, one she'd heard plenty of times on Loki. Xenophobes gathered powerful electromagnetic fields about themselves, using them to hurl bits of matter or disintegrating nano-D as weapons, to deflect bolts fired from strider charged-particle guns, possibly as a means of communication among themselves. The code, if that's what it was, had never been broken. The only meaning it bore for Katya was that Xenophobes were nearby.
But we knew that going into this. God, what am I doing here?
The jungle ended with heart-stopping abruptness, opening onto a hideous, gray-black scar that had devoured trees and rock alike. The fortifications that had surrounded the crater were still visible, like the slumping walls of a sand castle laved by the incoming tide. There were no sharp angles left, no hard edges; every surface had been softened, half melted and smoothed over by the passage of the Xenos' nano-D cloud.
Tatters of white fog drifted above the ruin, though most had dispersed back into the ground. A coal-black, tarry ooze had appeared where the Xenos had surfaced, and things, pearl-gray bubbles adrift on magnetic fields, were rising from the tunnel opening and floating across that hell-blasted wasteland.
"Travel spheres," Katya said. She'd seen them before, with Dev on Loki and on Alya A-VI. Researchers still weren't sure what purpose they served, but they knew that each was filled with the flaccid, jellylike lumps of mingled organic and inorganic substances that were known to be the real Xenophobes, the puppet masters of the larger, snake-named combat machines.
"Can we try contacting one of them?" Hagan asked. His voice was broken, the words distorted by the hiss and wail of static.
"Vic, you're breaking up. Switching to laser com," Katya said, and an invisible beam of light connected the two striders. "How do you read?"
"Solid L-LOS lock." Hagan replied, his voice clear now.
"Okay. As for contacting travel spheres, I don't know. If we can get close enough, maybe." The travel spheres had been seen at other Xeno breakthrough sites, but no one knew what they were for sure, or why they appeared.
Fear twisted in her mind. This was where she decided, once and for all, if she really believed in this scheme to contact the Xenophobes for the Confederation. How could she approach them? How could she make them understand? Open warfare had already broken out between the Xenos and humans here. It must, surely, be too late now for attempts at communication.
Or was it? Movement caught her eye, a thrashing within the white fog that still clung to the inner rim of the crater. Katya focused her optics on the movement and engaged her telephoto zoom. Enlarged, the sinuous object could be resolved as a Cobra, one of the dozens of different Xeno Alpha types, all named for Terran snakes. The flattened spreading of the anterior end that had given it its name was clearly visible. Fog clung to its body like a viscous fluid, streaming from its black flanks with each movement. Enlarging the image again, she saw that the Cobra's posterior end seemed to be entangled with a Xeno combat mode. There were the spines and the tentacles, weaving about weakly now, and she thought she could make out battle damage, a slash that had nearly cut the Alpha combat module in half.
Enhance . . .
She wasn't looking at two Xenophobes, but at one. She could see how the Cobra's body swelled into the distended black mass that had been a combat sphere. Had the thing been damaged while in the middle of shapeshifting from one form to another? It seemed possible. Several of the travel spheres hovered above it. Were they helping the Xeno somehow? Repairing it? On guard?
Or merely curious?
One thing struck Katya about the scene, however. The Xeno machines, whatever they were, were not warlike. At least, they weren't at the moment. Strangely, they didn't even appear to be aware of the two warstriders standing on the barren slope above them. If she was to have a chance at approaching a living Xeno machine, this was it.
"Okay, Vic," she said, deciding. "I'm going out."
"Yeah." His voice was hard, brittle. She could detect traces of his earlier anger. Earlier that morning, as they'd readied to leave the Emden base. Vic had argued with her about which of them should approach the Xenos. She'd had to pull rank on him—the second time she'd been forced to do so—to win even a grudgi
ng acceptance. "It's your show. But I'll have the bastard in my sights, Katya. If that damned thing even twitches wrong, I'm burning it."
It was the plan already worked out with Sinclair back in Babel. From what Dev had told her, she was pretty sure this was the substance of Operation Yunagi as well. Isolate a damaged Xeno machine, approach it with a comel . . . but with backup support ready to fry the monster if it looked like it would rather fight than talk.
The problem was, she would have to make the approach with at least her arm bared; the DalRiss comel functioned only when in direct contact with a living wearer's skin.
She glanced at the data on her visual display. The external nano count was at point zero five, low enough for prolonged exposure even without full armor . . . but the count was certain to be higher closer to the crater. How much higher? She couldn't guess, and she wasn't about to go tramping toward the damaged Xeno and its strange companions in her Ghostrider, not and risk having her approach mistaken for an attack.
Sighing inwardly, she transferred control of the Ghostrider to Lipinski, then broke her linkage. She awoke within her own body, lying inside the strider's cramped interior.
If she hesitated, she knew she would never be able to carry this off. Quickly, she removed her helmet and began readying her gear.
Chapter 17
We still don't understand precisely how comels work. Somehow, the DalRiss have genengineered a creature—intelligent, yet not self-aware—that can create a kind of neural bridge between one thinking species and another. What comes across that bridge aren't thoughts, exactly, but perceptions, awareness, empathy, patterns that our brains interpret as memory. It's not unpleasant, but it can be disconcerting.
—from a report given before the
Hegemony Council on Space Exploration
Devis Cameron
C.E. 2542
Katya had used comels before. At least, she'd used them in ViRsimulation with the DalRiss, though she'd never actually communicated with a Xenophobe before. She'd been present when Dev had done so, however, and the memory of that encounter was still seared into her brain with the vividness of a particularly gruesome and paralyzing nightmare.
Stepping off the access rungs of her strider and onto softly yielding ground, she turned to face the Cobra. It took an effort of will to take a step away from the comfort and perceived safety of her Ghostrider . . . then another . . . and another. She was wearing her bodysuit, which, when sealed, doubled as a full environmental suit: a chestpack with regulator and two hours' worth of air; and a breathing mask that included a visor designed to screen out Marduk's ultraviolet. She'd opened the sleeve on her left arm and rolled it back to her shoulder. Clinging to the bare skin of her arm was a translucent, gray-black mass—the comel taken from the maglev train a week before. Wet and glistening, it coated her hand and forearm like a heavy rubber glove. It felt cold where it touched her skin, almost bitterly so compared to the forty-degree temperature of the air around her. A thermovore, it was feeding on the heat generated by her body.
She wondered again if this scheme of hers could possibly, possibly work.
The Xenophobe hadn't reacted to her presence yet, and that, at least, was comforting. It suggested, as Dev had reported after his contact with the Xeno World Mind on Alya B-V, that the Xenos didn't simply blindly attack humans, but that, possibly, they were quite unaware of them.
If that was true, she might be able to get within touching distance of the things before they sensed her. Maybe . . . She fought the trembling weakness in her knees and stomach that threatened to stop her in her tracks each time she took another step.
Her old, old dread of confinement threatened to shake free from the mental boundaries and restraints that she'd so carefully built up around it. She could remember the acrid stink of her own fear as she'd lowered herself into that vertical pit on Alya B-V, within a dead city on what once had been the DalRiss homeworld. At the bottom, with the amorphous walls of that cavern closing in about her, she'd first found Dev's Scoutstrider, its hatch open and its headlights angled toward an uneven, slime-coated patch of wall.
Then she'd seen Dev, his form nearly engulfed in a living cocoon of glistening black shapes, each the size of a man's head. Minutes earlier, Dev had emerged from the shelter of his warstrider in order to touch the Xenophobe cell mass directly; lost in the monster's eldritch, siren's song he'd not even been aware of how comel and Xenophobe together had drawn him into that oozing mass.
It didn't hurt him, she told herself. It didn't hurt him. At the end, he stepped out of the slime and talked to me. The thing didn't hurt him.
The surface beneath her feet was not muddy, as she'd expected from its smooth and uniform texture, but was coated in a talcum-fine dust that puffed about her boots and hung, weightlessly suspended, in the still air. An analytical part of her mind noted the phenomenon and explained it. Molecular rock. The Xeno nano-D carried rock molecules out of the ground and off the RoPro walls and deposited them across several square kilometers. . . .
Around her, the land looked blasted and barren, and she fought the desire to turn and flee for the treeline of the jungle at her back. The heat was stifling and wet, only barely held at bay by the intricate layering of her close-fitting bodysuit. The crippled Xeno Cobra and its strange attendants were some forty meters below her, not far from the base of the hill.
From here, she could see that the Cobra had indeed been caught halfway through its protean transformation between one incarnation and another. Part retained the slender, almost filamentary reach of a Cobra, the flattened hood that had given the monster its name limp on the ground but easily recognizable. The other end seemed grotesquely bloated, expanded into a partially deflated sphere trailing dozens of black spines and tentacles, the typical shape of a Xenophobe Alpha combat form. The sphere, kissed by the passing of some warstrider's weapons, had been ripped open; the interior, black and glistening, was alive with an oozing, deliberate movement. It looked like hot tar, within which floated half-dissolved lumps of some organic matter. Several of the pearly spheres, she saw, lay close by, half their surfaces melted away to reveal more of the black slime-things.
Reinforcements, she thought, applying the obvious military interpretation to what she was seeing, trying to understand. Part of the crew was killed, and reinforcements are climbing aboard. Or is it an engineering team, arriving to make repairs?
It was difficult to make sense of any of what she was seeing. Blocky, sharp-edged crystalline shapes, like faceted blocks of cut glass, had grown from the dust and the fog, a jackstraw tangle of fantastic shapes that Katya had seen before, in Xeno-occupied regions of the far-distant DalRiss worlds. Less definable shapes grew from the Cobra's broken body, almost as though it were somehow slowly growing, healing itself as she watched.
Twenty-five meters now. It still hadn't seen her.
Seen her? Those tar-slimed lumps had nothing like eyes, nothing even recognizable as sense organs. She remembered that Dev had reported the Xenophobes possessed senses unlike those of humans, but she couldn't imagine what their view of the world must be like. Xenophobes, Katya decided, must be deaf and blind; perhaps they only perceived the outside world dimly through the artificial senses of their organic machines.
"Katya?" Hagan's voice sounded ragged and on edge, a whispered rasp from her compatch. Static blasted the words, but at this range they were intelligible . . . barely. "You okay?"
"I'm fine, Vic." She'd plugged the compatch into the T-socket behind her ear, so she could think her answer and transmit it through her cephlink. It was good only for close-range communications, but it meant her speaking voice wouldn't be muffled by her mask . . . or betray the dry-mouthed terror she felt. Unfortunately, it functioned on radio frequencies rather than through her strider's laser com, and the Xeno static roared in her ear like the crash of a heavy surf. ''No response yet."
"We're—ssssst—you hit the dir—sssss—you hit—sssss—the overkill."
"Sorry, Vic . . .
didn't quite catch that. Boost your gain and say again."
She heard the hum as Hagan increased his signal power. "I said we're locked onto that thing. If I yell 'Down,' you hit the dirt. I'd hate to singe you with the overkill."
"I hear you. But . . . iceworld, okay?" The military slang meant to stay cool, unemotional. "Let's give things a chance."
She couldn't tell if he'd heard her or not.
From fifteen meters, it was clear that the Xeno Cobra, which she had always thought of as a combat machine akin in spirit, if not form, to a human warstrider, shared some of the traits of living creatures. Its surface had the lusterless sheen of a metal-plastic or metal-ceramic composite; its interior was wet and pulsing, like the body cavity of something alive.
Where, Katya wondered, was the dividing line between creator and created, between tool-user and tool? The Xenophobes obviously possessed a technology similar in some respects to the bioengineering of the DalRiss. Rather than manufacturing tools, the Xenos grew them within their own bodies, building them molecule by molecule through some means of inward-turned perception and manipulation incomprehensible to humans.
A shudder as icy as the touch of the comel on her arm shivered down the length of Katya's spine. She was afraid, and what she feared was not the Xenophobe strangeness or ugliness of outward form; the things were so unlike anything recognizable that there was nothing to trigger Katya's own xenophobic instincts, instincts that might have left her screaming had the creature before her in some way resembled, say, a spider, a reptile, or some other, more familiar, stranger.
Instead, it was the Xeno's unknown and perhaps unknowable qualities that terrified. Did it see her as a threat? As lunch? Did it even see her at all? And when it finally reacted to her presence, as it soon must, what would it do? Her right hand brushed against the holster riding low on her hip. She hesitated, then flipped open the catch, freeing the Toshiba Type 07 laser pistol resting there. Not that it would hurt a Xenophobe Alpha any more than a flashlight might . . . but its weight against her thigh was strangely, irrationally reassuring.