by Ian Douglas
She was pretty sure that the battle with the Imperials had been the easy part of the mission. Disciplined and well-organized troops nearly always won against rabble, and the Imperials had been rabble, fighting among themselves, lacking morale, and almost totally without leadership. The question they should be asking themselves, she thought, was what had gone so wrong that Imperial Marines had become rabble?
It was entirely possible, even probable, that establishing peaceful contact with the DalRiss would prove to be more challenging by far.
Hours later, power had been restored, the air leaks stopped, and the environmental systems set to full capacity, purging the buildings of every lingering trace of the local atmosphere. Soon, personnel could remove their masks and breathing gear or park their striders inside the maintenance bay and at last unjack and unseal from their duralloy mounts.
Katya, however, was within a virtual reality created by the base AI. "As near as we can tell," she told Dev as she wrapped up her after-action report, "all Imperial personnel on the planet have been accounted for. So far, we've been receiving nothing but cooperation from the civilians. I gather they've been more or less prisoners here ever since the DalRiss attack."
The ViRcom simulation had placed the two of them together in a richly furnished room with oriental decor and a view of a Zen temple's rock garden through an open door. Birds were singing outside . . . at least, Katya thought they were birds, though she'd never seen one alive. The war, the savagery of that short, sharp fight, seemed a million light-years distant.
"But why were the marines killing the techies?" Dev wanted to know.
"I think it was an abortive mutiny. I gather that most of the scientists and other civilians wanted to surrender as soon as they heard Confederation striders were on the surface. Kosaka wouldn't let them, and so some of the techs grabbed weapons and tried to take over Ops. Five civilians were killed there, and Kosaka gave orders to the marines to go ahead and shoot the rest. That's what they were doing when Lieutenants Langley and Callahan smashed through the door."
"They weren't part of some kind of secret program, then? Something Kosaka didn't want them to tell us?"
"I don't think so. Anything having to do with DalRiss contact is probably classified secret, of course, but there's not really that much to know. In fact, according to Dr. Ozaki, the Imperials haven't had any direct contact with the DalRiss since the attack, and that was over eight months ago."
"What, none at all? In eight months?"
"The Imperials have pretty much stayed indoors, trying to keep out of sight until they got some kind of definitive word from Earth. I have the feeling that they've been terrified of the DalRiss. They still don't know why the locals attacked them in the first place."
"They have no idea?"
"None at all. One day, everything was fine. The next, an entire DalRiss city was smashing through the fence. Damage was pretty bad, as we surmised from the orbital scans, though the main building wasn't touched. Kosaka didn't do a thing afterward. He just hunkered down to wait."
"I'd feel happier knowing just what it was they did to make the locals mad enough to attack them."
"Believe me," Katya said, "so would I. But Ozaki told me they haven't seen even one DalRiss since the attack eight months ago."
Dev considered this for a moment. "Okay," he said. "Sit tight and stay alert. Ground troops and more warstriders will be down soon."
"Dev, I'd like to at least put some patrols out. Nothing aggressive. I just want to know if the DalRiss are close by. I . . . I have a feeling that they are."
"You saw something?"
"No. It may just be intuition." She smiled. "Or nerves. But I'm pretty sure that nothing happens in these forests that the DalRiss don't learn about sooner or later."
"Um. Good point. We don't now how far their symbiosis goes, do we? It might extend to every life-form on the planet. Watch yourself, Kat, and don't go picking any flowers."
"There aren't any flowers to pick. I'm not sure how plants reproduce here, but apparently it's not by pollination." She frowned. "When we landed, we did trample quite a few plants . . . or whatever the ground cover here is. There's no way to avoid it, really."
"Come to think of it, I doubt that will upset the DalRiss," Dev said. "Their buildings trample ten-meter-wide swaths when they move. My read on it is that they don't have any particular taboo against killing lower life forms. They use them, in very direct and pragmatic ways. That would fit with the notion that all or most of the life down there was originally created, or at least heavily reworked, by them."
"Good. I was half-afraid we were up against radical Greenies, here. Even if the plant life is pink and orange instead of green."
"So far as your idea about putting out patrols—your people can be trusted?"
"They're good people, Dev. The best."
"I'll leave it to your judgment. Just don't shoot a DalRiss—or one of their damned walking buildings—by accident." He paused. "Oh, and Katya?"
"Yes?"
"That was a good job you pulled down there today."
She shrugged. "Like I said, I have good people. And the opposition was pretty disorganized."
"You carried out a well-coordinated and decisive assault in the face of heavy numbers against a fortified position. Your fast action probably saved the lives of a lot of civilians. That was great work, Katya. Real hero stuff, especially the way you charged in there to stop the massacre of the civilians, and I'll see to it that you get full credit for it."
His praise was warming. "I . . . don't feel very heroic." In fact, she felt quite the opposite. Her wild charge on the Imperial defenses could so easily have gone wrong. Now that the battle was over, she felt weak, drained of strength and of emotion. It was often this way for her after combat, and she knew the best way through it was to keep herselfbusy. There was certainly enough to do.
"I shouldn't have to remind you, though," Dev continued, "that a colonel's place is not running around in a firefight wearing nothing but a skinsuit and mask."
"I couldn't very well sit there in a crippled warstrider and just do nothing," she replied, a little stiffly. "And the two Ares-12s might have turned out to be too clumsy to use inside the building." She shrugged. "It worked out okay."
"Maybe. In future, Colonel, you will stay where you belong, buttoned up inside your command strider directing the overall battle. Understand?"
"Yes," she said evenly, holding her temper. "I do."
"Good. That's all I have to say right now. I'll talk to you later."
He dropped out of the linkage, leaving Katya alone. She disengaged and a moment later stepped out of the ViRcom module in Kasuko's office. The air still held a trace of the rotten-egg stink of hydrogen sulfide, lingering despite the best efforts of the building's environmental system.
She found herself teetering between conflicting emotions. It wasn't the rather mild ass-chewing she'd just received. Dev's criticism had been right on target. She'd bitten down hard on the ass of more than one cocky young striderjack who'd wandered off-line from where a strict assessment of his military duties said he ought to be; more than once, that cocky young striderjack had been Dev Cameron, back when he'd been a newbie in her platoon.
No, her growing fear had more to do with the subtle change in Dev's manner toward her. Years ago, she'd been the senior officer, he the junior. Later, especially when he had returned to almost exclusively naval service while she'd continued jacking warstriders, the two of them had been more or less equal in rank and in command responsibility, but in widely differing spheres.
Technically, the two of them shared command of Operation Farstar, with him responsible for the space-naval aspect of the expedition while she bossed the ground forces. Technically, too, his rank of commodore gave him the final say if they disagreed on some point of strategy or diplomacy; no military unit could afford the luxury of a democracy in its command structure, and some one individual had to be clearly and definitely in command.
She made her way down from Ops to the maintenance bay, which, like the rest of the building, had been sealed off and cleared of contaminated air, flushed with nitrogen from the base's reserves, then brought to standard temperature and pressure with the rest of the facility. Both sets of main doors had been closed, restoring their air lock function. Inside the bay, any lingering traces of ShraRishan atmosphere were masked by the sharper stink of smoldering wreckage—rubber and plastic, steel and duralloy.
Assassin's Blade rested in one of the service gantries, the gaping wound in its left shoulder where the arm had been torn away spilling a tangle of half-melted wires, cables, and control circuitry. It would be awhile before the big RS-64 was fit for service again.
Carefully picking her way down the strider-warped steps of the stairway, she dropped onto the metal grating of the deck and strode toward a group of eight or ten striderjacks standing near the Blade. One of them saw her approaching and nudged one of the others. A second later, and they all were cheering, thrusting clenched fists in the air and calling her name. "Katya! Katya!" Others in the maintenance bay took up the chant. For a moment, embarrassment warmed Katya's face and she wanted to turn and leave. Then a surge of pride kicked in . . . pride not in herself so much as in these people.
Her people.
"C'mon, c'mon," she called, yelling to make herself heard. "As you were!" She caught one of the striderjacks with her eyes. "Callahan! I need a strider. What's available?"
Sublieutenant Jesse Callahan pointed toward a pair of machines standing empty and powered-down to either side of the maintenance bay door, a LaG-42 Ghostrider and an Ares-12 Swiftstrider. "Those two are free, Colonel." He looked eager. "Where you goin', sir? Need a number two?"
"No, take me!" another called.
"I'll go!"
"Negative," Katya told them. "I'm just going out on a circuit of the base. You all carry on here. That your Swiftie, Callahan?"
"Yessir."
"I'm going to borrow it for a bit, if you don't mind."
"Kuso, no prob—I mean, sure, Colonel!" His face lit with pleasure. "Help yourself!"
Callahan's Swiftstrider was nicknamed Longlegs, and its nose art—-surprisingly chaste for the art form—portrayed a woman with long, bare legs but otherwise fully clothed. It took Katya about fifteen minutes to set the Ares-12's AI to her cephlink and brain activity, with the computer asking questions or telling her to visualize certain images while it calibrated the linkage to her specs. At last, though, the full linkage engaged. Katya brought the power up full, took an experimental step forward, then swung to face the air lock doors. "Ops, this is Dagger One," she said over the tactical channel. "I'm going out."
"Anything wrong, Colonel?" Crane's voice shot back.
"Not a thing, Captain. I just want to run a quick visual check on the perimeter."
"How's your ammo?"
She'd already checked. "About half, and full power on the lasers. All systems read tight and hot."
"Opening up. Keep your channel open, Colonel, and don't get too far out."
"Will do, Captain. Thanks."
Moments later, she was outside again. Several Confederation striders were already outside, keeping watch. She ignored them, setting the Ares-12 in motion toward the tumbled-down eastern fence.
She was not going to sit and brood about Dev Cameron. Impulsively, she wanted to do something, and this was the one thing that came to mind.
Picking her way with birdlike agility past the fallen fence, Katya stepped into the midst of the ShraRish flora reclaiming the land that once had been the site of a DalRiss city. Beyond the clearing, the forest beckoned.
Katya set her course due east and kept moving.
Chapter 23
One key indicator of intelligence must be the ability—and willingness—of A to communicate with B, both in B's language, and within B's cultural and perceptual framework. The converse, expecting B to speak A's language . . . or to understand it as A continues to speak A's language with greater volume and slower speed, is certainly an indicator not of intelligence, but of abject stupidity.
—Cultures in Conflict
Sidney Francesco Dawes
C.E. 2449
"The dead things have never ventured so far from the emptiness, Lifemaster." The Watcher tightened its grip on the projecting branch and leaned out farther past the gently twisting trunk of the tree, attempting to follow the progress of the strange shape moving into the forest. The sound combination it used for "dead things" and "emptiness" were virtually identical, and given difference only by the creature's inflection. In its perception, the forest was a sparkling, dancing three-dimensional sea of what humans might have seen as light; the "dead thing" was an empty shape, a hollow vaguely outlined by the ri-glow of life. Beyond, the emptiness was afar vaster void where life had once been, but which now had the shape and flavor of barren rock, a hole in the fabric of life.
"Keep tasting the dead thing," the Lifemaster replied, its voice relayed to the Watcher through a small organ, a living radio growing at the base of its brain. "Tasting," for the DalRiss, meant active sampling through sonar, a high-frequency, sonic probing that yielded volumes of information about the composition and workings of soft-skinned objects but told next to nothing about rocks and other dead things.
"I am tasting, Lifemaster," the Watcher said. "The dead thing moves but has no taste at all. Do you expect it to change?"
"We expect nothing. Keep it under observation until we arrive."
"Who comes?"
"A Decider."
"A decision is to be made, then?"
"Only if necessary. But the dead thing's movements suggest that it will be."
The forest was hauntingly beautiful despite the strangeness of the shapes, a shaded place out of the direct blaze of Alya A's light, where the trees, if they could be called that, wove interlacing tendrils overhead in a canopy of red and gold and pink. Here, the fiercest competition for light took place meters above the ground, and the forest floor was almost empty of vegetation. There was a carpet of sorts, like moss, but softer, almost liquid, and glowing the color of ripe grain in a New American field. Some growths were festooned with dripping masses of foam, which appeared to be a life-form in its own right rather than some analog of sap flowing from the trees . . . mildly disgusting until Katya remembered a tiny New American creature that churned small masses of froth to hide itself and its eggs. A particular insect on Earth did much the same.
That link in form carried with it a measure of familiarity. However alien the life, there were certain rules that would be obeyed, certain forms that would be repeated. Unless the DalRiss genegineers had twisted the natural system completely out of shape, predator and prey would establish the same relationships, and the formulas this world's life used to eat and grow and survive and reproduce would all have been familiar to Darwin, however strange the shape of the life itself.
Katya felt out of place here, moving her four-and-a-half-meter duralloy body through that pristine riot of alien vegetation. She'd had to cut out the input from her motion detectors as soon as she'd left the Imperial base, and in this heat her
thermal sensors were all but useless. Still, she was aware of what had to be animal life as well. There were . . . things in the trees and plant-clusters around her, small and secretive for the most part, though once something crashed away through the brush in front of her with the noise of a small avalanche.
And there was other noise as well, bombarding her through her external sound pickups. The air around her was filled with a cacophony of high-frequency whistles, chirps, buzzes, and hissing static. She could not tell whether she was listening to the mindless calls of animals, the ranging chirps of sonar . . . or an invitation to stop and take part in some intelligent conversation.
It might also have been a challenge . . . or a warning. She tried not to think about that possibility.
Katya brought the Swiftstrider to a halt well inside the forest and scanned her surroundings carefully across a full 360 degrees. She was surrounded by life here. Save for a nearby outcropping of rock and for the duralloy shell of her warstrider, every visible surface was an organic one, even if some of the textures and surfaces looked like nothing she had ever seen before. This place would do well as a test site.
The experiment was an inherently simple one, concocted after she'd reviewed once more what she knew of the DalRiss. The key to understanding the DalRiss seemed to be their reverence for life . . . or was it simply their fascination? At the Imperial base, however, she'd been struck by the blatant confrontation between the duralloy and fabricrete of the human-built structures and the living ecology that surrounded it. She couldn't help but wonder if the DalRiss attack had somehow been the product of that confrontation, either an admonition to keep off the local equivalent of grass, or an expression of the fear that creatures capable of burying that grass under pavement must be capable of anything.
Evidently, the Imperials had been thinking along the same lines, though they hadn't yet dared to do anything about it. According to the personal journal he'd kept in the base computer net, Kosaka had been trapped in an agony of indecision after the DalRiss attack. Unwilling to demand an evacuation—fleeing after that one incident would have resulted in a considerable loss of face—he'd nonetheless feared doing anything that might trigger another assault. He'd not repaired the perimeter fence because some of the civilian scientists had speculated that the DalRiss might be sensitive to the flow of electric current, that they'd therefore deliberately knocked part of the fence down while inflicting only minor damage to other parts of the facility.