Warstrider: All Six Novels and An Original Novella

by Ian Douglas

  "I'm wondering if that might be what caused the problems out there," Dev said. "The Imperials can be a bit heavy-handed, sometimes. If the DalRiss took offense . . ."

  "That," Sinclair said, "will be one of the first things you'll have to determine. Why did the DalRiss attack?"

  "And are they mad at all humans, or just the Imperials?" Smith suggested. "Can we use their anger as an opening to get them on our side?"

  "The biggest problem," Ortiz pointed out, "will be to find out if concepts like anger mean the same to the DalRiss as they do to us."

  "Is the base even still standing?" Dev wondered. "Maybe the Imperials don't have anything left on the ground."

  "That could be good for us, or bad," Katya said thoughtfully. "If the Imperials have abandoned the surface, it might be harder to approach the DalRiss. They could have some sort of quarantine up, something that would make getting in difficult."

  "I didn't claim this mission was going to be easy," Sinclair said. The others laughed.

  "Can we get a closer look at that base?" Dev asked.

  "No problem," Sinclair told him. "Hang on."

  The domes swelled in the observers' perceptions, rotating in space as their walls became transparent. The display now showed the interior structure, color-coded to indicate sleeping and living facilities, storage areas, power plants, environmental systems, control centers, and the other minutiae of a self-contained base in an alien environment.

  The largest structure, the topless pyramid in the center, included a hangar with elevators for shuttling air- and spacecraft up to the top-level flight deck, where three Kamome-class ascraft rested in holding areas separated by protective revetments. Inside the hangar, another four shuttles rested in maintenance cradles. The building's lower level housed thirty-two warstriders, a full company standing in motionless ranks, their torsos encased in wirework service gantries. The schematics showed them as scarcely more than outlines. KY-1180 Tachis, Dev thought.

  "I take it the Kamomes and the Tachis are educated guesswork," he said.

  "Guesswork," Sinclair added, "and at least four months out of date. Still, it should give you an idea of what they could have in a base that size. And there are heavier machines there. The intelligence data that you brought back mentions at least one Katana."

  "And any word on what they have in orbit?"

  "Nothing positive, and again, by the time you get to Alya the intelligence will be almost eight months out of date. However, we can assume that they will have the equivalent of an escort squadron there, at least, plus transports and stores ships."

  "I'm more concerned with how we're going to convince them that we're different from the Japanese," Katya said. "They can't be all that aware of the differences between individual humans, and they probably won't understand our motives."

  "This sounds familiar," Dev said. Contact with the Naga had encountered similar difficulties. How does one communicate in any meaningful way with a being that possesses an entirely alien structure of logic and thought?

  Sinclair laughed. "Well, Dev, why else do you think that we've given this assignment to the two of you? We have complete faith in your ability to communicate with these . . . peopie."

  "Have you considered the possibility of trying to communicate with the Japanese instead?" he suggested. "It would be a hell of a lot easier."

  But then they began discussing the details of the mission.

  Chapter 8

  First contact was made with the DalRiss in 2540, when one of their living starships materialized near Altair, a star chosen by their Perceivers because of its similarity to their own sun. Communications, facilitated by the DalRiss constructs known as comels, led Hegemony authorities to the conclusion that the DalRiss had been fighting for some time against their own Xenophobe invasion. Friendly relations were soon established, primarily as a direct result of human intervention in the Alyans' struggle against a common foe.

  Despite this alliance, however, to date human and DalRiss remain strangers to one another. Mutually alien to a degree not easily grasped even by xenosophontologists, the two civilizations seem to have remarkably little in common save for their respective drives for survival.

  —Alien Perspectives

  Dr. Hector Ferrar

  C.E. 2542

  They walked together in strangeness, Dev and Katya, Sinclair and Brenda Ortiz. The light was harsh, blue-tinged and heavily laced with ultraviolet, the sun shrunken but so dazzling that it seemed to fill the sky. The plants—could they be classified as plants?—the red and purple growths around them, then, were flat sheets of flexible, spongy material, continually twisting and writhing in a slow-motion dance designed to keep a maximum of surface area in direct sunlight, and animating the landscape with an unsettling life of their own.

  Despite the fact that Dev had been in an environment like this one before, he was having trouble understanding what he was seeing. The setting was one where even comfortable and easily grasped referents like scale and the sense of perspective generated by a gentler sun had been altered. A sulfur haze in the air made things look more distant than they actually were, and in all that landscape there was nothing as recognizable as a tree or a building against which he could compare the stranger aspects of his surroundings.

  None of them wore protective suits, which would have been necessary had they actually been standing on the surface of one of the two DalRiss worlds. This was a ViRsimulation, run through the Rogue's AI and downloaded to the four as they lay in com modules in Sinclair's office suite.

  "So you're coming along, Professor?" Dev asked Brenda Ortiz, who was serving as their guide.

  "Do you think I'd miss an opportunity like this, Captain?" she replied. "I've been working for this for three years now, and I may never have a chance like this again."

  Originally an AI metalogician from the Universidad de México on Earth, Professor Ortiz had first visited the Alyan system with the Imperial Expeditionary Force three years before as an expert on alternative logic. Since the IEF's return to the Shichiju, however, she'd been attached to the newly founded Xenosophontology Department of Jefferson University on New America.

  The outbreak of open civil war had stranded her on New America until the Confederation government decided to abandon that world. From what Dev had heard, Ortiz was completely apolitical, uninterested in taking sides in the worsening rebellion that was flaming across the Frontier. She'd reasoned, however, that the Imperials would be unlikely to allow anyone on New America access to the Alyans. If she wanted to continue her studies of them, she would have to do so through projects sponsored by the Confederation.

  And as far as the Confederation was concerned, they couldn't afford to lose her expertise. Not now, with Farstar at last about to bear fruit.

  "Is this sim supposed to be set on ShraRish or GhegnuRish?" Sinclair wondered aloud.

  The fifth world of Alya B was GhegnuRish, the original DalRiss homeworld; the sixth planet of Alya A was ShraRish, a once-lifeless world altered some twenty thousand years before to support a DalRiss-engineered ecology.

  "This is A-VI, General Sinclair," Ortiz replied, looking around with something like a proprietorial pride in her eyes. "According to our most up-to-date information, the DalRiss are back on Ghegnu again, but not in large numbers. The tame Naga there is helping them rebuild the place, but I gather it's still not much like what they think of as home."

  "Hell of a note," Dev said. "Having to terraform your own homeworld. Or maybe 'DalRissaform' would be a better word."

  The others laughed.

  DalRiss civilization on GhegnuRish had been destroyed long before by the Naga occupying that world's crust. Dev had haunting memories of that silent, tortured landscape, of strangely grown buildings and less identifiable structures consumed and reworked by the alien Naga. By the time the Imperial Expeditionary Force had arrived, a second Xenophobe had nearly wiped the DalRiss out on their colony world of ShraRish as well. The IEF had used deep-penetrator nuclear weap
ons to destroy the Xenophobe manifestation on ShraRish, but on GhegnuRish, Dev had managed to make contact with the Naga, the first time such a thing had ever been tried.

  "What we're seeing here was programmed by the Imperial mission at Dojinko," Ortiz continued as the group picked its way past a sponge-covered outcropping. Overhead, sulfur clouds bulked huge, violet-silver where they faced the sun, golden brown to red-black in their shadowed bellies. "I gather some of your intelligence people copied it from a research station and smuggled it out to New America. It's about two years old."

  "Are we sure the data's solid?" Sinclair wondered. "Some of this looks so strange. Like some Imperial intelligence officer's nightmare."

  "It looks like I remember it, sir," Dev told him. "Pretty much, anyway. I don't remember seeing a lot of these plants when we were at ShraRish before, but from what I understand there's a lot more variety to the life there than on most human worlds." He nudged a writhing clump of purple vegetation with the toe of his boot. "That's why there are so many different shapes and colors."

  "Deliberate variety," Ortiz agreed. "The DalRiss genegineer everything, remember, including themselves. Natural evolution is faster, too. The ecosystem is driven by very high levels of ambient radiation."

  That much was obvious simply from the activity displayed by the ground cover. The Alyan suns, circling one another at a mean distance of nine hundred astronomical units, were a type A5 and a type A7, respectively nineteen and thirteen times brighter than Earth's sun. Energy spendthrifts, such stars squandered their hydrogen capital in a fraction of the time taken by older, cooler suns like Sol. Where life on Earth had taken the better part of four billion years to evolve from self-replicating molecules to intelligence, the same process had taken a few hundred million years on Alya B-V, in a high-energy environment where all of the processes that made life what it was, from biochemical reactions to metabolisms to random mutations, seemed speeded up from a human perspective.

  "All chemical processes are faster?" Katya asked. "I wonder, do the DalRiss think faster than we do?"

  "Almost certainly," Ortiz replied. "In our discussions with them, we get the definite impression that they spend a lot of time—from their points of view, anyway—Just standing and waiting for our replies. Fortunately, they seem to possess more patience than do most humans. Otherwise we might never have been able to talk with them at all."

  Drops of rain began falling, though Dev felt nothing in the simulation. That was just as well, he thought, for rain on the DalRiss worlds contained high concentrations of sulfuric acid. "This is why we'd need suits in the actual environment," Ortiz said cheerfully. "It's actually possible to walk around with no special gear at all save a breathing mask, for short times, at least, but this rain could burn you."

  "The ultraviolet's pretty harsh for unprotected skin," Dev added. "That would burn you too."

  "The predominant gas in the mix is nitrogen, as I recall," Sinclair said. "But less than nine percent oxygen."

  "Depending on who you talk to," Ortiz said. "For a while, the Imperials were confusing the issue with data that suggested the DalRiss worlds were just like Venus, except for low surface pressure. Impossible to visit without very special gear."

  "They wanted to discourage unofficial exploration," Katya said. "And casual visitors."

  "Are those buildings?" Dev asked, pointing at some low, slick-surfaced shapes of various dark colors a hundred meters off. Actually, they looked more like trees than artificial structures . . . though Alyan trees little resembled their Earth-grown namesakes. They were squat and rounded, growing out of the ground rather than sitting on it, more similar to large gourds or oddly carved lumps of sponge than anything else.

  "Dwellings, yes," Ortiz replied. "Of course, while they're normally sessile, they can move, and they're more attached to their owners than to the landscape. We've found that DalRiss family groups tend to shift and change around a lot. When an individual leaves the current grouping, his part of the group's communal dwelling goes with him."

  The DalRiss had followed a cultural and technological evolution quite different from that pursued by Man, developing the biological sciences almost to the exclusion of the others. They grew homes and workplaces and entire cities rather than building them, using genetic engineering to develop a bewildering array of organisms, from manufactured viruses to vast organisms of obscure purpose hundreds of kilometers across. For the DalRiss, chemistry had been a product of biological research, rather than the other way around. Mining, refining, and smelting were relatively new processes carried out by organisms that extracted elements and compounds from rock or the sea, and the products were generally incorporated into new life-forms, rather than being assembled as the inorganic components of lifeless structures.

  Even the physical appearance of the DalRiss could vary tremendously, for individuals seemed to have less interest in outward form and appearance than did humans. DalRiss were composite creatures, a relatively small and physically weak Riss, or master, symbiotically riding the nervous system of a gene-tailored Dal that provided it with legs and strength. Most common were massive creatures like spiny, six-legged starfish that bore their riders in a mouthlike orifice atop their bodies, but Dev had seen organic combat vehicles, living warstriders, mounting weaponry based on explosives and complex acids. As a human might plug himself into an AI-directed vehicle or other piece of equipment, a Riss could plug itself into its Dal, into its dwelling, or into some other creature designed to eat or manufacture things or procreate. Even their spacecraft were enormous, deliberately bred organisms that used hydrogen combustion to make orbit and an as yet unidentified means of bending space to cross from star system to star system.

  Raindrops splattered about them, then dwindled away. The sky was as active as the vegetation, with clouds gathering, then breaking up in surreal patterns of silver, violet, and brown.

  The group was walking toward the crest of a low ridge nearby. As they started climbing, movement caught Dev's eye. "There's one," Sinclair said, pointing. "A DalRiss, I mean. What's it doing?"

  The DalRiss was standing on the crest of the ridge about twenty meters away, a bristling of spines and tentacles growing erect atop its ponderous, six-limbed organic transport. Its head—at least, Dev thought of that ragged crescent shape with the odd, eyeless protuberances to either side as a head—was cocked back at an angle, and the tentacles were telescoping in and out with a flickering, bewildering rapidity that had no obvious purpose. The leathery swelling at the back of the crescent, which Dev had been told housed the creature's braincase, was glistening wet, perhaps from some internal secretion, though it could have been the rain. A trilling sound, wavering at the very edge of human hearing, fluted in and out of Dev's perception.

  To Dev, it looked as though the thing was singing in the rain.

  "Unknown," Ortiz said, answering Sinclair's question after a brief pause. "Art form? Religious observance? Singing? Eliminating body wastes?"

  "They see with active sonar," Dev said. The crescent-shaped "head," he'd been told, was a fluid-filled organ used to focus sound waves, while the widely spaced stalks to either side picked up the echoed returns. "Maybe it's looking for something."

  "A lost compatch," Katya suggested. "I'm always losing mine."

  "In the sky?" Ortiz asked. She sighed. "Three years of research and we still know almost nothing about them."

  "You know, I thought we had their language down pretty well," Sinclair said. "If it wasn't for their comels, we'd never have been able to communicate with the Naga. They must understand interspecies communication in ways we can't even guess at yet."

  "Oh, we can talk with them, if that's what you mean, thanks to their comels, and thanks to that patience I mentioned. We can share impressions and some sensory data and, with a computer's help, we can translate the sounds they make as articulate speech. The comels go a step further and actually translate certain nerve impulses into recognizable analogues, allowing, well, not telepathy,
exactly, but a way of sharing feelings, emotions, even some memories, though we still don't know how they do that.

  "But the cultural and physical framework behind their language is different from ours, obviously. A lot different. We ask a question and we get what sounds like a rational answer. The only problem is, we often don't know if either the question or the answer means the same to the DalRiss as it does to us."

  "Well, have you asked about what it's doing now?" Katya wanted to know. "What's its 'rational answer'?"

  "It depends," Ortiz said, smiling. "Sometimes they say communing, though they won't say with what. Our translation programs also render it as easing, or sometimes as draining. You see, their spoken language is quite complex, with multiple layers of meaning. Um, imagine having three mouths, and being able to carry on a conversation with one voice, while adding a running commentary with another and providing thesaurus elaborations or dictionary definitions with the third, all at the same time."

  "They have three mouths?" Sinclair asked.

  "No. They use what we call a mouth for eating, not for speaking. Their speech is generated by a series of bladders inside their sonic organ, that big crescent on top of the body."

  "Okay, so what does this communing you mentioned mean?" Dev asked. "I don't care how complex the word is, it's got to have meaning, right? What do the experts say?"

  Ortiz shook her head. "There are no experts in this business, Captain. Only guessers, and sometimes one guess is as good as another, especially when the, the elaborations by the different voices are contradictory. Or seem contradictory to us.

  "Look, the modern approach to human psychology is, what? Three or four centuries old. If you count the half-superstitious speculation that passed for a science before that—and there were some important insights to come out of precephlink research, of course—then it's a lot older than that. Yet we still have trouble understanding why people do what they do, why they think the way they do, today. We've been studying these people for three years, now. How much progress do you suppose we could make in that short a time, given that we knew almost nothing about their ecology, their evolution, their moral and ethical standards, their motivations to begin with. Hell, it took us awhile just to figure out that what we thought of as a DalRiss was really made up of two more or less separate organisms. We're not going to really understand these folks for a long, long time to come!"