Warstrider: All Six Novels and An Original Novella

by Ian Douglas

  *Is this what you/we call war?

  And then, the towering, larger-than-life feeling vanished. My God, what am I doing? What have I become?

  **No. This is not war. It's slaughter. Useless slaughter.

  The magnetic charge he'd been focusing for yet another shot into a fleeing Imperial warship dissipated, unneeded. In space far above Herakles's equator, a cruiser caught at the fringe of a blast spun brokenly end over end, its control systems smashed by a glancing blow. The four surviving warships, under full thrust now, fled, seeking safety in the empty depths of space.

  No more rocks pursued them.

  Chapter 28

  Reality . . . virtual reality. The two echo one another, mutually complementary, mutually supporting. Yet in the end it must be reality that lays the greater claim to our souls, for it is in our link with the universe as it is that we find the heart-quickening joy-flavor-terror-wonder that tells us we truly live.

  —Intellectus

  Juan Delacruz

  C.E. 2216

  Katya rose from the ground as the mysterious storm wind died away. Sight and hearing had returned, though spots still danced before her eyes. Clouds still swirled across heaven, bringing with them sheets of rain, but the spectacular lightning storm was ended. She stood there, feeling the rain pelt her body and she felt . . . alive.

  The rain lightened as quickly as it had come, dissolving to mist sprinkling the steaming ground. An Imperial trooper in full armor stumbled toward her, weaponless, his helmet gone, his eyes wide with terror. She stepped into him with a slashing elbow thrust, snapping his head back and sending him to the ground.

  A laser pistol rested in the holster at his hip. Drawing the gun, she advanced across the torn and scorched ground. Two more Imperials approached, saw her, and ran the other way. She let them run. The enemy was harmless now, demoralized by what had happened.

  What had happened? She still wasn't sure. Other soldiers gathered in small and fearfully huddled groups atop the ridge. Katya noticed that some groups included both Confederation and Imperial troops. The events of the past few moments appeared to have obliterated those differences that had once divided them.

  She was reminded of genie and human, singing together in the barracks at Stone Mountain.

  A warstrider loomed against the smoky sky. It was a Ghostrider, and it bore on its prow the name Victor.

  It was Vic Hagan's machine.

  "Katya?"

  "Vic!" She nearly fell into his arms as he dropped off the rungs set into the Ghostrider's leg.

  "God, Katya! What happened here?"

  She turned and stared up at the mountain of the atmosphere generator. It was silent now, still wreathed in clouds, but no longer spitting lightning. Parts of its regular surface looked uneven now, where huge chunks had been torn away.

  "I'm not sure, Vic," she said. "But I'm hard-jacked certain that the Heraklean Naga had something to do with it, and if I'm right about that, then I'll bet Dev had something to do with it too."

  "You mean . . . he's alive?"

  "I think we'd better grab a magflitter and go find out."

  "Where?"

  She looked toward the atmosphere generator, wreathed now in muttering purple clouds. "There. Up there on the mountain."

  Dev was deeply shaken. Arguing from a strictly military viewpoint, he decided that perhaps he should have tried to destroy all of the Imperial ships. He'd certainly been trying to do just that . . . and he could have succeeded had he tried.

  On the other hand, he'd all but annihilated the Imperial squadron, destroying fifteen of the nineteen enemy ships. The survivors would return to Earth and other Imperial bases, bearing the story of a frightful, inexplicable, irresistible Confederation weapon, of white fire and destruction against which there was no possible defense.

  For as long as this war continued, the Imperials would remember Herakles and wonder what weapon it was that the Confederation had used there. Hell, it was just possible, if there were any among their leaders who had a modicum of sense, that the bloody nose they'd received here this day would lead them to grant the Confederation independence without any further fighting.

  Dev hoped so.

  With a thought, he dissolved the side of the Naga traveler that had sheltered him through that artificial storm. The air was steaming wet, and still tasted of ozone and summer lightning. Stepping out onto the side of the mountain, he wavered a moment, then dropped to hands and knees. He felt so . . . weak. . . .

  **I/we must part company now.

  *Why? Your enemy is crushed! And I/we have a new Universe to explore!

  **I/we . . . I don't want to be a god. I can't be a god.

  *What is a god?

  Dev couldn't answer. He was lying on his side now, unable to move. He didn't remember falling. Rain drizzled from a leaden sky.

  **Please. Leave me.

  *Agreement/disappointment/sadness. It was good not to be lonely.

  **You won't be lonely. We'll still . . . talk. And I'll introduce you to others. But I don't think I can manage having you inside me like this. Not all the time.

  *Was there discomfort? Damage?

  **No. Temptation.

  *What is temptation? I don't understand.

  **Never mind. Can you leave me . . . as I was? Uh, you don't need to break the back again.

  *I would never do such a thing! You are Self!

  **I am . . . I want to be human.

  *You . . . love . . .

  **. . . Katya, yes.

  *Katya . . . loves you too. She told >>self<<. I do not . . .

  **. . . understand . . . no. But it is good . . .

  *. . . not to be lonely.

  A feeling like a ripple of warm silk passed along his chest. Dev opened his eyes, but the sight of the Naga supracell spilling out of his chest along thousands of hair-thin tendrils, slowly growing larger as it retreated from his body, was disconcerting. He kept his eyes closed until he felt his perceptions dwindling, felt the radio link with the Naga snap.

  When he opened his eyes again, he was alone on the ledge.

  When he tried turning his awareness inward, he found . . . nothing. Nothing! He could no longer examine himself internally. His entire being felt . . . smaller, and sharply limited. Only five senses!

  Could he possibly go back to what he'd been?

  It was a long time before he allowed himself to feel again, and then it was with the hesitant caution of a man who thinks he might be badly hurt, who fears the pain will come with his next wrong movement.

  He suspected, though, that the parting Naga had left some changes intact. He retained a clarity of thought he'd not possessed before, a clarity undimmed even by the crushing exhaustion that pinned him now to the artificial mountain ledge.

  The Naga was gone, withdrawn into its underground lairs. Dev felt a sadness, a loneliness unlike anything he'd known before, worse even than the day he'd lost his father.

  Or possibly it was his father he was missing now; he'd never been able to mourn him, not really. Tears ran down Dev's face, mingling with the rainwater there. Tears of sadness for his father, and his mother too. Tears of happiness, too, for Katya . . . for he thought he could feel her approach.

  Katya and Hagan arrived with a flitter moments later. "Dev!" She cried, vaulting from the vehicle and racing to his side. "Dev! You're alive!"

  Vic helped him stand. "Thank God, Dev! I thought . . ."

  Katya threw herself on him, hugging him close.

  He clung to her, losing himself to her reassuring warmth. Somehow, he managed a ghost of a smile. The tears continued to flow. "I'm . . . human," he said.

  Epilogue

  Tharby padded on bare feet across the richly carpeted floor, bearing a tray as he'd been trained. As he approached the Master's artroom, the door dissolved and Sonya walked out.

  As was the rule in the Master's house, the ningyo was nude, while he wore only a white fundoshi wrapped about his loins. They were forbidden to speak to one
another, but they made brief eye contact, and she gave him a curt nod.

  These past few days, it had been necessary to be extremely careful around the Master. He spoke little, but from what the household servants had been able to piece together, the Empire had lost a battle, possibly a very important battle, at a far-off place called Herakles.

  Tharby didn't know the significance of that battle, but he did know that if the Imperials were unhappy about it, then it was good.

  Captured on New America, he, Yodi, and Sonya had been loaded aboard a transport and shipped to Earth, to Singapore Synchorbital where the ponderously fat man they knew as Master had ordered them interrogated, then retrained for his personal servant staff. The interrogation had been brutal and painful, but soon ended. Service to the Master was brutal and painful as well, and showed no sign of ever ending. Sometimes, Tharby nearly despaired.

  Silently, he entered the artroom, which Sonya had just told him was clear. He paused a moment inside as the door rematerialized at his back. Inside, there was a tatami mat, a rack of swords, and the desperate, silent agony of the inochi-zo.

  Tharby felt a powerful kinship with the twisted artform; they both were genies, though the living statue possessed far less of the human genome than did Tharby. Swiftly, he set the tray down, then approached the statue. Its pain-racked eyes followed him, pleading.

  "I told you I would come," he told it. Reaching into his loincloth, he extracted a small bottle, unsealed the stopper, and poured the liquid contents into the soil from which the inochi-zo grew. The dark, human eyes blinked twice, then closed.

  "Peace, little brother," Tharby told it. With luck, the Master would assume it had died of some unknown illness.

  Someday, somehow, perhaps Tharby and the other servants could arrange the Master's death as well.

  "The day is coming, little brother," he told the dying statue. "You will be avenged."

  The genie turned, picked up the tray, and walked proudly from the room.

  Warstrider:

  SYMBIONTS

  by

  Ian Douglas

  Originally published under the

  name William H. Keith

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Epilogue

  Terminology and Glossary

  Prologue

  It was early morning and the tiny, arc-brilliant disk of Alya A was just rising above the mountains to the east, setting golden clouds aflame in a silver-and-violet glare that touched the domes and upthrust commo towers of the Imperial base with white flame. A storm the night before had left puddles of highly acidic rainwater steaming on the pavement. That once-smooth surface was going to need replacement soon; the elements on the world called ShraRish were hard on structures and materials fabricated by Man.

  Inside the perimeter fence that surrounded the human base, a warstrider stood watch, an Imperial KY-1001 Katana, five and a half meters tall and massing thirty tons, its jet black, armored hull bristling with articulated lasers and missile pods. Servos whined as one great, flanged foot lifted clear of the pavement, then set down again with a heavy thud, a three-meter step. External sensors were fully deployed, scanning in a complete circle around the lumbering machine.

  Shosa Shigetaro Tsuyama had been on duty that morning since the end of the first watch. His number two aboard the two-slotter Katana was Chu-i Yoshikata Sanada, jacked into the strider's right-side pod. At the moment, Sanada had control of the Katana's main gun, the big, blunt 150-MW laser in its universal mount set beneath the strider's flattened, aircraftlike hull, while Tsuyama had reserved piloting functions and the secondary weapons to himself. Briefly, he halted the Katana's pacing and focused his main sensor array toward the sunrise.

  Linked through the web of nano-grown threads riding in and over the folds of his cerebral cortex, jacked into the Katana's artificial intelligence through feeds plugged into sockets behind each ear and at the base of his neck, Tsuyama was for the moment completely unaware of his flesh-and-blood body, tucked away within its coffinlike command slot inside the warstrider's hull. As far as he was concerned, he was the warstrider, the big combat machine's precise and graceful movements guided directly by his brain's neural impulses, which were rerouted through his cephlink and the Katana's AI before they reached his spinal column.

  The sun climbed slowly higher, clearing the mountains and brightening in his vision until the automatic filters in his optics cut in. Beyond the blasted patch of naked ground staked out by the electrified perimeter fence, the ground cover, ruffled clumps of gold and yellow, began its writhing dance.

  Sugoi, he thought. The Nihongo word could mean marvelous or wonderful, but the taste he gave it now in his mind carried the connotation of weird, even ghastly. Tsuyama longed for a decent world, one where a man could breathe the air and where the plants didn't crawl, where there were colonist girls to jack with and where the native population didn't look like some horrid mixing of eyeless monstrosities best left in the blackness of the ocean depths.

  With an inward sigh, he checked the time. Another two hours to go. Warstrider sentry duty here, he decided, was a complete waste of time. The security watch behind the perimeter fence could just as easily have been left to robots or to the automated laser cannons in their teleoperated turrets. The DalRiss were harmless, and everyone knew that the Xenophobe on ShraRish was dead.

  Everyone.

  "Shosasan?" his number two said over the strider's intercom. "Are they sure the Xenophobe here is dead?"

  The sublieutenant might have been echoing Tsuyama's own thoughts.

  "Certainly, Sanadasan. The creature is no more. Otherwise it would have eaten us in the night, neh?"

  Things weren't quite that simple, of course. During the past half century, the life-form originally labeled "Xenophobes" had been encountered on half a dozen inhabited worlds of the Shichiju. Their seemingly irrational attacks on human colonies, the mass murders of entire populations on planets like Herakles and Lung Chi, were assumed to be the result of some xenophobic twist in their psychologies, hence their name. Contact, when it was made at last, had demonstrated that the Xenos—renamed "Nagas" after the pacific serpent deities of Hindu mythology—had not even been aware of humans as intelligent individuals. Indeed, their introspective and strangely inverted worldview had kept each world-Naga from realizing that there was any intelligence, any life in its entire inside-out universe of Rock and not-Rock other than itself.

  The DalRiss also had an odd way of looking at things, though their worldview didn't seem so alien to Tsuyama as did that of the Naga. They, at least, possessed a technology of sorts, and cities, and starcraft . . . though they seemed to have developed that technology along almost entirely biological lines, breeding their machines rather than manufacturing them.

  "Shosasan!" Sanada sounded worried.

  "What is it, Sanadasan?"

  "I . . . I think something is moving out there."

  "Where?"

  "At zero-eight-five degrees. Just outside the fence."

  Almost directly into the rising sun. Tsuyama squinted against the glare, dazzling even through his stopped-
down optics. Briefly, he shifted to radar, then to ladar ranging, and finally to infrared, heavily filtered. "I see nothing but the city," he told Sanada, interpreting the radar and laser returns as DalRiss buildings. The alien city, if that was what that strange clumping of organic forms really was, lay just beyond the perimeter fence to the east.

  "Something is moving there! I'm sure of it!"

  "Kuso! Everything on this accursed planet moves!" Motion sensors here were all but useless, fooled by the peculiarly twitching plant life. Even the DalRiss buildings—if you could call them that—could move at times. Tsuyama had seen one once, slowly gliding into the nearby city like an enormous slug.

  The DalRiss moving about? Possible. Even probable, though the aliens, like most of the rest of the life on this star-baked hothouse of a world, got much of their energy directly from sunlight and rarely stirred until later in the day. Certainly the Rebellion posed no threat, this far from the Shichiju. Or so he and Sanada had been repeatedly told. . . .

  Still, Tsuyama was fully on his guard now. While the Rebellion that was tearing the Terran Hegemony apart was a long, long way from ShraRish, he'd still heard plenty of rumors brought in by the shipjackers aboard freighters and escorts that continually came and went between the Shichiju and the twin Alyan suns. According to some stories, the rebels and their so-called Confederation had won a battle against Imperial forces on a planet called Eridu . . . and during the battle the Eriduan Naga had appeared from underground, attacking Imperial forces as though it had allied itself with the enemy. Even stranger things were rumored to have happened in a space battle a few months ago in the Heraklean system. The cargo jacker who'd whispered that story to Tsuyama had insisted that an Imperial Ryu-class carrier had been destroyed. Ridiculous, obviously . . . and yet the rumors, as they so often seemed to, were taking on a greater and greater life of their own.