by Ian Douglas
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.
That sea of iridescent blackness was aware of him, he knew, not through sight or hearing, but through dozens of stranger, more subtle senses that probed and tasted rock and magnetic fields and the sizzling flow of electrical currents. The mass below Dev's warstrider was heaving itself up out of the pit, an ocean of black tar given mobility and will, extending a multiton pseudopod toward the opening in which Dev's Scoutstrider perched.
"Back!" Dev called, and he reversed his strider's movement, shuffling the RLN-90's half-folded legs back in the cramped space of the tunnel. "Get back, quick!"
Dev had managed to scuttle back perhaps ten meters from the tunnel mouth when the pseudopod plunged through the entrance, swallowing the glare from the RLN-90's spotlights, pushing forward like a thick, black paste ejected through a narrow opening by tremendous pressure. It hit his Scoutstrider with jarring force, toppling him sideways into the wall of the tunnel, then sweeping him along like a toy caught in a flood. The rush, the sudden impact were so abrupt that Dev didn't have time to fire his weapons. He was still trying to keep his warstrider upright when his link with the machine's AI flared static white in his mind, then winked out into blank.
"Vic!" Dev screamed. "Vic! Cut Fred loose!" If they could release the Eriduan Naga fragment . . .
And then Dev was awake and in his own body, locked inside the padded, coffin-sized crevice of his strider's link slot. Power was gone . . . as were his control systems. The Scoutstrider was an inert, string-cut puppet of dead metal, and Dev was trapped inside.
Vic Hagan backpedaled furiously as the nightmare, gelatinous wall of blackness exploded toward him through the tunnel opening. His data feed from Dev's Scoutstrider was lost in a flutter of static. He'd heard only a sharp-screamed "Vic!" from Dev, the name cut off short.
He'd positioned himself a good eighty meters behind Dev's strider, since he'd been linked to the view fed to him from the other machine. When the feed vanished, Vic could see the top half of Dev's RLN-90 starkly pinned by the lights of his Fastrider, its legs awash in the tarry ooze. The LaG-17 mounted two fifty-megawatt lasers, one to either side of its stubby prow like the mandibles of some spindle-legged insect. He triggered both lasers together, sending a double pulse of laser energy into the black sea advancing toward him up the tunnel, trying to sear the thing as close to Dev's RLN-90 as he could without risking hitting the other machine.
Nothing. The moving blackness drank the coherent light scarcely a ripple. Vic fired again . . . and again. A flash of silver rippled across the surface of the gelatinous mass, then vanished so swiftly he wasn't even certain he'd really seen it.
He took three more steps backward as the Naga mass advanced, colliding with the maglifter pallet where it hovered behind his strider. Sensors transmitted the shock of contact, the metallic brush and scrape as his left leg ground against Fred's travel pod. His full attention focused on the advancing Naga, Vic overrode the sensor data and pushed, still backing up the tunnel.
Balanced on tightly focused fields that rode the planet's own magnetic field, the maglifter pallet yawed to its side as the Fastrider forced itself past, slammed into the tunnel wall, then crashed to the floor. Vic squeezed past it, willing the Fastrider's legs to move faster, panic rattling at brain and heart as the night black horror kept rolling toward him.
His lights caught a piece of Dev's warstrider still afloat on the tide . . . a leg, Vic thought. Then he saw another piece, the right arm still bearing its hundred-megawatt laser, ripped from the RLN's hull in a careless display of raw power. He couldn't see the hull. The black mass reached Fred's pod where it lay now, dented and torn, on the floor of the tunnel and washed over it like an ocean breaker. The wrecked maglifter was swallowed an instant later.
Weapons were useless. Vic concentrated all of his energy on movement, backing up the tunnel with all of the speed he could muster. The Fastrider's legs scissored almost to a blur, duralloy-flanged feet striking sparks against the smooth floor of the tunnel, one outflung arm clanging against the wall in a desperate bid to urge the machine backward yet a bit faster.
The black tide kept coming. He wasn't going to make it. . . .
Dev thought he was facedown, though in the disorienting blackness of his strider slot, it was difficult to tell for sure. It felt as though the Naga had engulfed his Scoutstrider and was bearing it along within its mass, a tiny morsel, swallowed whole. A grinding, shrieking clash of tearing metal howled inside the narrow confines of the compartment, conjuring images of his warstrider's dismemberment . . . or worse, of the life-support hull cracking and the black ooze pouring in.
Never had Dev felt a terror this dark, this penetrating, and he had to battle with all of his swiftly tattering strength to keep from howling aloud and pounding on the sides of the strider slot with his fists. Instead, moving by instinct and by touch, he struggled to reach the storage compartment built into the side of the slot.
It opened when the panel read the data feed from his left palm. Urgently, wrestling to maintain some small bubble of sanity and rationality within a rising sea of panic, he thrust his left arm into the compartment, striking cool, dry softness within. He felt it envelop his arm, from fingertips to elbow, felt the touch grow cold.
The comel, manufactured yet alive, biological construct of the alien DalRiss, clung to his arm like a living glove. Dev's only hope of survival now, he knew with grim certainty, was to talk to the thing that had swallowed his Scoutstrider like a casually tossed peanut. Katya had surv
ived being swallowed by one of these things. He could, too, if he could talk to it before it killed him.
As his outraged sense of balance told him his warstrider's hull was rolling to an upright position, his right hand hit the emergency manual release for the strider slot's hatch. With a hiss of equalizing pressures, the seal on the RLN's environmental pod broke. The hatch slid aside, revealing a blackness that was, if anything, more absolute than the black inside the slot.
Dev gasped. The air outside the Scoutstrider was breathable but blistering hot, stinking of sulfur and fuming, unnamed vapors driven from slow-cooking rocks. He took another breath, fighting the urge to gasp. The air here, if anything, was more oxygen-poor than that on the surface; desperately, he fumbled for the slot compartment that held a survival mask and bottled oxygen.
The warstrider hull slammed again against unyielding rock, flinging Dev against the side of his slot with brutal force. Metal screamed, then groaned and creaked with the growing urgency of a living creature at the edge of an agonizingly prolonged death. The RLN's torso, half-submerged and stripped of legs and arms and its usual clusters of antenna and sensory pods, was folding under the caress of incredible pressures exerted by the black sea.
Dizzy, blind, disoriented, Dev couldn't find the mask's compartment. Gulping at the air now, straining to find substance there to keep him conscious, he sat upright in the slot. All he needed to do was touch one of the Naga's interconnected supracells. . . .
His head banged rock half a meter above the warstrider's hull, and Dev saw a momentary explosion of green-and-purple light. Raising his left hand, he felt the rough drag of rock past the comel-encased tips of his fingers. The RLN's hull was moving, and quickly, born on the Naga's thick embrace through the tunnel.
But which way? Up the tunnel, in pursuit of Vic? Or back the other way, toward that reeking, briefly glimpsed pit? Keeping his head low this time, he struggled into a partly upright position, groping into absolute blackness with his comel-clad hand, trying to touch some part of the unseen mass that carried the wreckage of his strider, boatlike on gelatinous waves. He could feel the hull tipping again as it rolled over, spilling him toward the surface that carried it. Dev thrust his arm out farther, seeking contact. Where was the Naga's surface? Where? . . .
Pressures unbearable snapped the Scoutstrider's hull and the sides of the slot closed around his waist like the jaws of a trap. Dev screamed, the sound shrilling and echoing through the blackness. Agony tore at his lower back and legs . . . then vanished as he felt his spine snap.
A jolt, and he was free of the wreckage, but his back was broken and shock had left him dazed and incoherent. Strange thoughts flooded his brain but he could not order them, could not begin to understand them as anything beyond scraps of nightmare hallucination. Then, with a sudden, light-headed sense of falling, he was hurled through the opening of the tunnel and into the black and empty space of the great cavern. I'm going to die. The thought, as he recognized it as coming from some part of himself, was actually welcome, a peace that stilled the terror that threatened to rob him of his last shreds of human reason.
Seconds later, he struck the surface of the Naga. That surface was yielding, almost liquid, but Dev struck it after falling nearly fifty meters, and he hit with killing, bone-splintering force.
On the surface, Katya had broken the seal on her LaG-42 Ghostrider and was sitting up in the open hatch, keeping her left hand against the slot's palm interface so that she could stay linked with the communications net. Her full linkage had been broken, however. Impulsively, she wanted to experience her surroundings with her own senses, to see the mountain-high bulk of the atmosphere generator with her own eyes.
"Hey, Colonel?" The voice in her mind was that of her Number Two, Sublieutenant Tomid Lanager. "Don't you think you oughta button up?"
Another child, like Ken Maubry, now dead, like Chet Martin, abandoned with the other Rangers still on New America. Katya felt so very old.
"Negative," she snapped back, her mental voice harsh and biting. "Maintain your watch."
"Uh, yessir."
A half dozen other warstriders stood nearby, silently waiting. There were some people on foot, too, a platoon of armored infantry and a handful of senior officers, come to watch the great experiment. Among them was Travis Sinclair.
That's the man who sent Dev down into the hole, she thought, and she was surprised by her bitterness. She'd admired Sinclair, even loved him, in a hero-struck way. Now she saw him as another damned politician, a man so caught up in the jacker's rush of playing god that he didn't see the people around him as people. Perhaps he had once . . . but no more. This damned revolution of his seemed programmed for nothing but to devour children, and in the end no one would be better off for their sacrifice.
What had happened to her people—full humans and genies—back on New America?
A burst of static hissed against the background of her thoughts, then cleared. Vic's voice sounded, frantic with fear and speed. ". . . Hagan, do you read me? This is Hagan, does anyone copy?"
"We're here, Vic," Katya sent back. Fear clutched at her throat. "What's your situation?"
"I'm . . . I'm coming out. Katya, I'm sorry. Dev is lost. Dead. He must be dead."
The words left her numb, though somehow, she'd known them even before Vic had spoken. "What . . . what happened?"
"I don't know. We'd just reached the point where we could see the Naga—"
"You did see it, then?" Sinclair's voice cut in. Katya could see him holding a palm comm link with a cord jacked into his left T-socket. "The Naga? . . ."
"I saw it, yeah." Hagan's voice was dry. "It just . . . attacked. No reason that I could see. It just rose up and blasted into the tunnel and smashed Dev's Scoutstrider to bits."
"What about the Eriduan Naga?" Sinclair asked.
"I don't know. The thing got Fred, too. Just kind of washed over the pod and swallowed it. I didn't see any change in the thing's behavior. It just kept coming!"
"It's okay, Vic." Katya had to work hard to keep her mental voice steady. "It's okay. Are you clear now?"
"Yeah. I think so. It chased me maybe a kilometer up the tunnel, then quit. I don't see any sign of it now."
"Maybe that was the change we were looking for," Sinclair suggested. "The Eriduan fragment communicated—"
"I don't think so, General," Hagan interrupted. "Like I said, it just kept coming. Like it was mad, or something." There was a long pause. "Okay, maybe it did change its mind and turn back. But there hasn't been any attempt to communicate. And I don't . . . I don't think I can go back down there. . . ."
Katya heard the agony in Hagan's voice, the unsteadiness, the indecisiveness. The man was on the raw edge of collapse, and when she closed her eyes and tried to imagine him far below the world's surface, alone, surrounded by unyielding night, she could easily understand. "Vic, you can't do anything else. Get the hell out of there." The words burned in her mind.
"But if the Naga tries to communicate—" Sinclair began.
"Dammit, there's nothing more he can do! There's nothing more any of us can do!"
"Maybe one of us could go down and look for Dev," Lee Chung volunteered. "I'll go."
"You'd be wasting your time, Lee," Hagan said. "Katya. Don't let him come. I tell you, I saw the thing tearing his warstrider to pieces! I don't see how he could have survived. Oh, damn it, Katya. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. . . ."
"It wasn't your fault, Vic." Tears were stinging her eyes, blurring her vision. "He might . . . Dev might still make it."
The thought was not wholly irrational. Katya remembered well her own contact with a Naga, far, far below the humid, poisonous surface of Eridu. Somehow, the Naga she'd contacted—she found herself thinking of it as Fred's parent—had analyzed her body chemistry, then manipulated it to keep her alive, even when her survival mask's oxygen had given out. She remembered little of that encounter still, save for the first terrifying moments of it, closeted away in blackness absolute, wi
th the weight of a world pressing down unseen above her head.
It was hard to tell, sometimes, what was memory of actual events, and what was remembered nightmare. She shuddered, pushing back unwelcome images of being buried alive.
Could the Naga hidden somewhere below the atmosphere plant keep Dev alive? She didn't have enough information to formulate an answer. The Naga was capable of it, certainly, as the Naga on Eridu had proved with her. But if Dev had already been dead when it engulfed him, even a Naga's near-miraculous mastery of chemistry would not have saved him. Xenophobes possessed remarkable powers of mind and of manipulation almost at the atomic level, but they were not gods.
No miracle of mere chemistry or of nanotechnics would call back the dead.
And if the thing had been trying to kill the human trespassers in its tunnel, it would have no reason to preserve his life.
She wanted to believe Dev still lived, however, and she clung to that slender thread, clutching against her awareness like a talisman.
"Vic?" Sinclair said. How she hated that voice now! "Can you patch a feed to us of what you saw?"
"Y-yeah. Stand by."
Dreading the images as she was, Katya nonetheless lay back down in her slot and jacked home her C- and T-sockets. Full linkage with Hagan's Fastrider resumed as he sent recorded images of what he'd seen in the tunnel. Briefly, horribly, Katya relived the nightmare darkness and close-pressing walls, saw the black tide surge forward, saw Dev's Scoutstrider hit, jarred backward, then swept under by the flood. She saw Vic's last glimpse of the RLN-90, the severed, metal limbs swallowed by the onrushing wave.
She was trembling as she broke linkage, and again unbuttoned the Ghostrider's hull and sat up, blinking back tears in the pale gold sunlight.
She didn't want to accept what she'd just seen.
Hours later, Vic's Fastrider appeared at the nearest entrance to the man-made mountain. The LaG-17 looked none the worse for its experience in the bowels of the planet, but it walked with what might be described as a beaten, even a despondent slouch of alloy legs and drooping hull. In all that time, there'd been no further word from underground, and Katya's desperate hope that Dev might still be alive was relentlessly unraveling.