Warstrider: All Six Novels and An Original Novella

by Ian Douglas

  Brenda was first to break the silence. "Frankly, Commodore, we haven't seen any evidence that they control their environment to the degree you suggest. If they were capable of doing what you claim, then surely the Naga wouldn't have posed the threat to them that they did."

  "Sure," Hagan said. "They could have introduced a virus that reproduced within Xeno supracells and made them wipe themselves out. Biological warfare. But from what we learned in the first expedition, the DalRiss had been fighting the Xenos for thousands of years. They'd been pushed off GhegnuRish entirely and were on the verge of losing ShraRish too. They needed us to come along and give them a high-tech edge."

  "Because," Dev explained, "the Naga live and work and experience on a nanotech scale. If the DalRiss are expert biologists, remember that the Naga are expert chemists . . . and when you get down to molecular and submolecular scales, there's no difference whatsoever between the two. I'm guessing, but I would imagine that the DalRiss spent a lot of effort trying to create viral or bacterial weapons for use against the Nagas, and the Nagas just assimilated each weapon and made it harmless . . . or else turned it on its creators."

  "Dev Cameron shows remarkable intuition," the third DalRiss said, "and an excellent grasp of the nature of our struggle. Few of the weapons we were able to design had any significant effect on the Chaos. A few weakened the enemy, and on numerous occasions we were convinced that we had eradicated the threat. Each time, however, a small reserve of uninfected Naga tissue survived hidden somewhere within the recesses of the planet's crust. Within a few hundreds or thousands of your years, however, they would strike again and with an immunity to the weapons that had stopped them before."

  "I submit, Vic," Dev said, "that you compare the scale of their Xeno war with ours. They fought the Nagas on two worlds to a standstill over the course of . . . what was it? Ten thousand years? Something like that. At the end of that time, the Nagas had the upper hand on both worlds—they'd won on one and were coming damned close on the other—but that was after ten thousand years. In our case, we'd been fighting the Nagas on six worlds for forty-odd years. We'd lost completely on four of them, and two of those worlds, Herakles and Lung Chi, had significant planetary populations. In all four cases, we'd been smacked right off the planet within one year. One year! On Loki, we won . . . or, at least, we think we won. What do you want to bet, though, that there are still isolated bits of viable Xeno cells and nano hidden away 'way down deep, where the nuke penetrators couldn't reach them? The only place we know we won is Eridu, and that's because we made friends with the thing instead of trying to kill it!"

  "Scary thought," Katya said. She stamped her boot on the ShraRish soil. "That also suggests we didn't win here like we thought, either. That the ShraRish Naga will be back someday."

  "It is their nature to survive," the first DalRiss said. "And to expand their influence from world to world. Fortunately, we no longer have to fight with them for mastery of the Yashra-ri. Though we learned, through a very long process of trial and error, the key to direct communication with the Chaos, it was Dev Cameron who actually made that breakthrough. The . . . the Naga of GhegnuRish is now our ally. We will take part of it with us when we carry our Great Dance to the stars."

  "I'd think the DalRiss and the Naga would have a lot to offer one another," Dev said.

  It was curious. As they'd been talking, he found he was learning how to tell one of the beings from another. He wasn't sure how . . . but there was something about the manner of each as it stood in the semicircle of DalRiss before the human party that communicated itself to him as it spoke. It was like reading the body language of a human during an ordinary conversation, something normally automatic and even unnoticed.

  To his considerable surprise, Dev was aware of this accelerated level of communication and understanding with the other humans in the party as well. The facility, he realized now, had been growing for some time but had remained unnoticed behind the churning wall of fear and stress that had occupied more and more of his thoughts over the past months.

  He could tell by looking at her, for instance, that Katya was still struggling with the idea that humanity's long war with the Xenophobes had not been won after all. The friendly relations achieved with the Nagas of Eridu and Mu Herculis seemed to guarantee mutually useful cooperation between Man and Naga from now on, but no one who'd spent as many years as Katya had fighting the Xenophobes could shake the feeling that the Xenos still didn't really understand what people were, that human and Naga viewpoints were so mutually alien that a new misunderstanding—and war—were possible at any time. Dev noticed the look Katya exchanged with Hagan, and even through their air masks he could read the new fear that the two of them were sharing. As for Ortiz and Ozaki, they were lost in strangeness, more concerned with the new insights into DalRiss history and biotechnology than with any merely theoretical concern about the Naga.

  "We are initiating a new symbiosis," the second DalRiss said. "We have been working closely with the Naga of GhegnuRish, the Naga you first made peaceful contact with, Dev Cameron. It has been induced to bud portions of itself, which we are learning to incorporate into the biological matrix of our space vessels. These buds will serve a wide variety of purposes within the new aspect of the Great Dance, as what you would call the computer network of our ships, as a means for storing and using data, as a means for repairing damage."

  "It sounds like we could learn a hell of a lot from all this," Dev said. "I'd like to see how you blend Naga and DalRiss biologies."

  "The sharing between two mutually alien ri is basic to our philosophy," the third DalRiss said. "The two together accomplish more than either apart." Dev felt the touch of his comel searching for data. "Yes," the DalRiss continued. "You humans call this synergy."

  "There could be a tremendous synergy if there was a similar sharing of what you know and what we know," Dev said. "We need your help, but there may be much we could offer you in exchange."

  "We see one point of philosophy that binds the DalRiss to you humans of the Confederation as opposed to those of the Empire," the first DalRiss said. "We respect diversity, in particular as it applies to the life of a world. But we could argue the need for cultural diversity as well. Just as a large number of interacting species are necessary for the viability and security of an ecosystem, a large number of interacting cultures is important for the life and health of a species."

  " 'Interacting cultures,' " Ozaki put in. "Do you mean war?"

  "Not at all. War is the attempt by one culture to suppress another, not to encourage its flowering. We refer to the interaction of ideas. Of philosophy. Of science and scientific discoveries. Of the products of research by one group shared with another to the improvement of both."

  "Trade," Katya said.

  "Trade does not occupy the place in our culture that it seems to hold in yours," the DalRiss told her. "But that, too, would be a factor."

  A lot more study was needed on the DalRiss social structure and how it worked, Dev reflected. The Collective appeared to operate without such human social constructs as trade because each individual DalRiss provided for its own needs. Groups of DalRiss worked together on such projects as the creation of a new life-form, but the benefits of those life-forms were available to all.

  Trade among humans had begun, it was believed, when agriculture had become so efficient that individual humans could specialize in their work, exchanging such skills as, say, pottery making for a share of the grain grown by the community's farmers. The DalRiss had never needed to specialize to that degree; each Riss fed off his Dal or from the living, mobile plant shell that was its home. The Dal ate the gene-tailored "moss" that covered so much of the open landscape, while DalRiss buildings drew nourishment from sunlight and directly from the ground. Cities were temporary groupings that dissolved when the mineral content of a given area was leached away. Since food and most other necessities were to all intents and purposes free for the taking, the concept of an individual perfor
ming work which it then sold to its neighbors appeared never to have taken hold among the DalRiss.

  "You of the Confederation seem to share our interest in maintaining a diversity of cultures," the first DalRiss said. "From what we were able to understand in our exchanges with the representatives of the Empire, this is not a philosophy they share. If we were to provide aid to your Confederation in this war, it would be on this philosophical basis."

  "After a while I'll recite the Declaration of Reason for you," Dev told them. "It's a statement of what we believe, what we're fighting for. You might be interested in hearing it."

  Dev wondered if, when he was crafting that document, Travis Sinclair had known that it would be used to persuade alien listeners of the rightness of the Confederation cause as well as humans. The theme at which that document hammered again and again and again was that humanity, in the variety of the peoples and cultures, races and religions living on the far-scattered worlds of the Hegemony, was too diverse to be ruled by a single government located on far-off Earth. Under Japan's Imperial rule, the very characters of those hundreds of separate peoples were stifled at best, and at worst were twisted into a mocking imitation of the shallow and elitist Shakai, the upper-class society of Dai Nihon.

  If there was any one aspect of Japanese life and culture that singled it out as different among all of the other cultures bom of Earth, Dev thought, it was the outward need for conformity. That was not to say that other human cultures didn't from time to time view difference as a disruption of the natural order; Jews, blacks, and the unusually bright or gifted, among many others, all had had reason to fear whatever it was that set them apart from their neighbors at one point or another in the long and often bloody history of Civilization.

  But the need to be different, the need to express one's individuality, had long ago become a luxury that the crowded Japanese islands could ill afford.

  Each Nihonjin thought of him- or herself as an individual, of course—indeed, they were often frustrated by the realization that gaijin didn't seem to understand that—but social pressures served to embarrass any Japanese person who stood out within the crowd, especially anybody perceived as unwilling to work for the common good of company, of community, of nation, of race. It was a social emphasis radically different from that of the West, where voluntary cooperation for the common good tended to come behind the needs of the individual.

  "Any information on Confederation beliefs would be welcome," the third DalRiss told him. The Perceivers on the Riss-symbiont's body all appeared to have their pupils focused on Dev.

  "Then I propose a trade," Dev said. "An exchange of information. I would like to learn more about what you're doing with the GhegnuRish Naga, and these spacecraft you mentioned. Both could have a very direct application in our war with the Imperium. In exchange, one of us will read and explain our Declaration of Reason and answer any questions you may have about why we're fighting to be free of the Empire."

  "That seems reasonable, though we don't understand why you expressed it that way. We would have answered your questions without this exchange."

  "Perhaps. Consider this another means of learning about us, about how we think."

  "For you to learn about the Fleet of the Great Dance," the DalRiss said slowly, "it will be necessary for you to come with us to GhegnuRish. Does this interest you?"

  "It certainly does," Katya put in. She glanced at Dev, then looked back to one of the DalRiss . . . not the one that had been speaking, Dev noticed. "We'd like that a lot."

  "We certainly would," Dev added. "And we'd like to see how your stardrive works, if that's possible."

  "Of course. We will arrange for you to see one of our ships in the company of an expert in directing the Achievers. Also, we will arrange for you to commune with the planetary Naga, which can give you details of our control and communications systems. Perhaps you could make use of some of these ships in your war to good advantage."

  Dev started to reply, then stopped, unable to speak, afraid that he was going to reveal the surge of emotion he was feeling. It looked as if everything Farstar had been designed to do was about to be handed him.

  Despite that, though, he was anticipating a trip to GhegnuRish with mingled joy and dread. The secret of the DalRiss instantaneous drive might well be the weapon that would make the Confederation victorious.

  But at GhegnuRish, he knew, too, he would be facing another planetary Naga. A capricious fate, it seemed, was pressing him hard toward a second Xenolink.

  Fate . . . or was it daltahng?

  Chapter 27

  It has been well established for at least three centuries that humans possess the equivalent of two brains apiece, the left and right hemispheres of their cerebrum. In general, the left side of the brain appears more closely associated with mathematical and analytical abilities, while the right side directs those applications requiring visual-spatial and artistic skills. One possible explanation for differences in individual intelligence, incidentally, involves the number of cross connections within the corpus callosum between these two brains, with a greater degree of cross connectivity being associated both with a smoother overall processing of information and with that curious something-from-nothing spark of creativity known as intuition.

  In line with this is a curious datum of comparative anatomy: women, by and large, tend to have a greater number of connections between the two halves of their brain, explaining, possibly, that largely anecdotal phenomenon known as "woman's intuition."

  —The Science of Mind

  Dr. Harvey Carpenter

  C.E. 2285

  The system of Alya B was much like that of Alya A, a young retinue of worlds circling through a dust- and meteor-choked volume of space centered upon a dazzling, type A star. The fifth world out closely resembled ShraRish in most respects, its land surfaces showing more vacant stretches of lifeless dun and ocher, but tinted here and there with the mottled shades of pink and orange that marked emergent Alyan life. Its seas shone violet and copper-sulfate blue in the hard white light of its sun, just as they did on ShraRish, and the clouds dazzled the electronic eye in swirls of white highlighted in blues and purples.

  Eagle had dropped out of K-T space several hundred million kilometers out and approached cautiously. Their informants on ShraRish had indicated that there were no Imperial forces at GhegnuRish, not so much as an orbiting observer station, but Dev still wasn't sure how sophisticated DalRiss technology was, especially in the—to them—new medium of space.

  As they neared GhegnuRish, however, his doubts were fading. There were no Imperial ships or stations in the Alya B system, but the region close to the DalRiss homeworld was thick with objects, with ships. Over a thousand had been counted by Eagle's AI through the ship's sensor suite, and there were more yet masked by the bulk of the planet.

  DalRiss vessels tended to be large, measuring anywhere from five hundred meters—twenty percent longer than Eagle herself—to monsters like the starfish shape at the Migrant Camp, two kilometers or more across and massing many millions of tons. Perhaps half were starfish shaped, flat and round, with varying numbers of thick arms; Dev was struck by their outward similarity to the Dal, until he realized—again, that unexpected flash of intuition—that he was looking at genetically altered Dal, enormous life forms grown from the tissues of creatures normally no more than three or four meters across.

  The rest were, Dev supposed, descended from the ambulatory house-organisms of the DalRiss, albeit grown enormous. They tended to assume cylindrical, spherical, or flat-headed mushroom shapes, and some, as Dev watched them through Eagle's navsim link, appeared to change shape slowly from one form to another. Though any comparison with human technology was dangerous, he knew, he couldn't help but think of the starfish shapes as the DalRiss equivalent of human military vessels, uniform in appearance, faster, more maneuverable than the others, while the ships grown from buildings were the freighters, the tankers, the heavy-hauler logistical arm of the Alyan fleet.


  "Our new friends have been busy," Katya said, linked into the net with Dev. "Do they really intend to abandon both their worlds?"

  "I don't think so," Dev told her. "The impression I get when I'm talking to them is that individual death doesn't matter that much to them, that even if they knew precisely when their suns were going to explode, any one of them would just as soon stay and take notes as leave. But they do value, oh, call it experience. Knowledge. Viewpoint, even. They try to save that . . . the way life saves particular combinations of DNA, I suppose."

  "You know, Dev, I get the feeling that you get a lot more out of your conversations with them than the rest of us do."

  Dev hesitated before answering. Katya had just touched that part of his new self he'd most been questioning during the past few hours.

  "I guess I do. But I seem to be getting a lot more out of everything lately."

  "It's the Xenolink, isn't it?"

  "I . . . I think so. I think it must be." Absently, he reached for a bit of planetary data he knew to be stored in an ephemeris stored in his personal RAM, then realized with a small start that the data was already there in his mind . . . without his having had to frame a coded search request. That sort of thing had been happening more and more lately, as though subprograms were running in his implanted hardware that had been placed there by some unconscious part of himself.