by Ian Douglas
The Gr'tak, what was left of them, at any rate, had to find another Grand Associative, a whole and unbroken Associative, with which they could join and mingle data.
That mingling was part tradition, part cold necessity. Gr'tak philosophy was given form by the Great Circle, composed of myriad stars of every color and brightness, the one composed of the many. Most Gr'tak had trouble even imagining solving any problem without the active collaboration and participation of a number of associatives.
Unfortunately, the Galaxy was extremely large. Theory predicted that intelligence should be fairly common, arising as a natural product of basic physics and chemistry on worlds of as many as one out of every thousand suns. If theory was accurate, four million stars or more across the Great Wheel possessed worlds blessed with intelligent life . . . but finding even one required searching as many as a thousand barren systems, a search that could take a very long time indeed.
Still, they'd tried, stopping at numerous stars as they moved outward from their former home, with the deadly, pearl-gleam light of their suns' funeral pyre fading behind them. On several, they found the crumbling remnants of civilizations long dead, and once they found a world populated by mossy, many-legged things that made tools from stone but were stubbornly and belligerently uncommunicative.
In any case, the Gr'tak knew that only a culture as advanced as their own would provide the answers they needed. They continued searching.
At long last, though, they'd encountered the faint, nonrandom crackle and buzz of modulated RF signals, a definite beacon shining in radio light against the misty backdrop of the Great Wheel, signals that spoke of Life . . . and Mind. The discovery had been purely random; had the Fleet continued on its original course, they might easily have skimmed through the outer fringes of that signal as it expanded at lightspeed across interstellar space and never even noticed it, or the message it carried.
Now, long after the detection of that first signal, space glowed ahead of the Fleet, rich in the muted colors of radio and microwave wavelengths. They were deep inside the volume of expanding radio noise now, a volume encompassing some thousands of stars; directly ahead, the innermost core of that radio shell beckoned, a cluster of discrete radio sources bearing the unmistakable imprint of technic civilization. Samplings were analyzed, ordered, tasted. The Gr'tak knew a quickening excitement. There was a richness of experience here that suggested Associatives on a grand scale.
The nearest star centered on its own glob of radio noise now hung scant light hours ahead of the hard-decelerating Fleet. . . .
Chapter 7
The Xenophobes—or the Naga, as humans eventually called them, after an ancient Terran serpent deity of wealth, peace, and fertility—were terribly hard to understand precisely because they were so different. Composed of countless trillions of individual cells, each massing one or two kilograms at most, a planetary Naga was like a single titanic brain, with the cells serving as interlinking neurons. They occupied the crust of the planet they'd infested, tunneling vast chambers underground, converting rock through a kind of natural nanotechnology into organic, living material. Active Naga eventually tunneled through to the surface of their world, manipulated magnetic fields in order to launch bits of themselves to the stars, then settled down into a kind of contemplative senescence . . . almost as though they were waiting for something.
Their view of the universe was strangely twisted from the human; for them, the universe was an endless sea of rock with a central emptiness, a world literally inside-out from what humans perceived. Nonetheless, with contact came communication, and with communication, slowly, came a halting but growing understanding.
—The Naga: A Study in Xenophobia
PROFESSOR DEREK K. BROWN
C.E. 2554
The CRS Carl Friedrich Gauss had not been designed as a luxury liner, nor as a warship. She mounted lasers and particle beam weapons, but the bow lasers had been installed as sweepers, computer-controlled weapons for disintegrating the bits of dust and cosmic flotsam that might endanger the vessel during high-speed maneuvers. Despite the fact that she was a converted passenger ship, her lines were not particularly elegant; her central spine, just under half a kilometer from blunt prow to massive aft thruster nacelles and made cumbersome by its clutter of blisters, nacelles, and strap-on slush-H tanks, was girdled by a broad ring mounted on a rotation cuff a quarter of the way back from the bow. When she was in free fall, her plasma drives silent, as now, the ring's stately rotation provided spin gravity. During acceleration, the ring section's decks, with nanotechnic tiles that reshaped themselves beneath the crew's and passengers' feet, adjusted the deck's angle to compensate for the change in acceleration vector.
As a research ship, Gauss would have been comfortable enough, if a bit spartan. With the addition of the Phantoms, however, space was at an absolute premium. The Phantoms' striderjacks were not the only guests aboard. The company had brought with it eighty-five other officers and enlisted personnel, ranging from mechanics and weapons technicians to General Vic Hagan himself, and his tactical staff.
Her father, Kara knew, had not really chosen Gauss as his temporary headquarters just because Kara and the Phantoms had been transferred aboard. Gauss, at the moment, was the center of all research into the Web, and he'd wanted to stay on top of the data Kara and her people were bringing in, as it arrived and was digested.
The conference room was on Deck One in the Gauss's ring section, with gravity provided by the ring's slow spin. The broad, curved viewall screen showed no sign of that rotation, however, since the image was being piped through from a camera mounted in Gauss's stationary prow.
The room had been empty when Kara was ushered in by a Confed marine guard in full dress. The viewall showed the Nova Aquila Stargate, needle-slender at this distance, its silvery length reflecting the light of the two white dwarf stars that circled one another at a distance of some 800,000 kilometers, the Stargate balanced at their center of gravity. Each star emitted a stream of scarlet flame that spiraled around half an orbit to vanish into the ends of the Gate like silken streamers at the end of a twirled baton. The scientists and technicians studying the Web and associated phenomena believed they were channeling star stuff into the Gate and across the Galaxy to some other site . . . but where that site might be, and why they were mining the stars of plasma stripped from their atmospheres, was still unknown.
Several other ships of the Unified Fleet were visible on-screen as well. Shinryu, the big ryu-class flagship of the Imperial Navy contingent. Constitution and Reliant, a pair of cruisers with the Confed squadron. Karyu was the Confederation flag, by far the largest vessel of the entire Confederation fleet. Originally an Imperial ryu carrier, she'd been captured twenty-seven years before at the Second Battle of Herakles. Kara's father had often joked that he'd named his daughter after the huge battle prize.
Also visible were a half dozen of the big, rough-surfaced starfish shapes that were living DalRiss cityships, each kilometers across, vaster by far than even the largest of the human-built ships.
The Unified Fleet had been parked here, orbiting the double star-Stargate trio at the hopefully safe remove of nearly one astronomical unit, where they could keep a watchful eye on the enigmatic Stargate. The fleet's actual eyes were much closer in, of course—robot flyers teleoperated by pilots maintaining I2C links from both the Karyu and the Shinryu. If Web machines emerged through the Gate's invisible portals, the fleet would know about it instantly, rather than in the seven to eight minutes it would take for news of the arrival to crawl out from the Gate by more conventional means.
The door hissed open at her back. "Kara!" a familiar voice said. "I'm so sorry to keep you waiting!"
She turned, smiling. Her father, General Victor Hagan, advanced toward her with outstretched arms. He, too, was in full dress uniform, the two-toned grays of the Confederation Navy. Normally, he would have been stationed aboard Karyu with the Unified Fleet's Confederation Military Command Staff, but he
'd been crowded in with the other guests aboard the research ship for almost a month, now . . . and he still always managed to present the crisp perfection in dress and bearing of the professional military officer. Kara wasn't sure how he managed it. He must, she decided wryly, grow himself a new uniform every couple of hours to keep it looking that sharp.
She also suspected he donned fresh-grown grays each time he was going to meet with her, for whatever reason. He can be sentimental that way, sometimes, Kara thought with a secret smile.
"Hi, Dad," she said, returning his hug. "You didn't keep me waiting at all."
He pushed her back and held her at arm's length for a moment, studying her face. "You're okay?"
"Clean bill of health. No static."
He let her go and glanced around the empty room. "I told Daren you were back," he said, glancing around. "I was expecting him to be here."
Kara shrugged, unconcerned. "The day my brother can be anywhere on time. . . ."
"He has been busy," Vic said. He looked at Kara a moment longer, then grinned with evident relief. "Damn, I'm so glad you're back. Back and. . . ." He broke off, embarrassed.
"And still sane?" Kara said, filling in the blank. "Or as sane as I ever was, at least."
"The casualty figures haven't exactly been encouraging," Vic said.
"No, they haven't," Kara agreed. She cocked her head to the side. "You know, Dad, it seems sometimes that the high brass has declared open season on striderjacks like us. Each mission they dream up is hairier than the last one. We're going to lose more good people if they keep sending us into hellholes like the Core."
"How was it?" Vic asked. "How was it really?"
Kara suppressed a shudder, crossing her arms, her hands clasping her elbows close to her sides. "Well, you'll get my report when I write the thing and download it. I just came up from the intelligence debrief on the war deck, so I haven't exactly had time for the routine scutwork."
"I'm not looking for your report," he told her. "I wouldn't normally get to see it anyway, unless I asked for it special. And then, well, it looks bad."
She nodded. Having a general for a father, especially one as high-ranking and as powerfully connected as the Victor Hagan, could be a real problem, especially when she was trying to carve out her own career as a Confed military officer. The fact that her mother was Senator Katya Alessandro of the Confederation Senate made it even worse. There was always the assumption—unspoken, of course, but very real—that she'd gotten her rank because of her family connections.
Vic spread his hands. "But I do want to know what you saw in there," he continued. "I'll be briefed, certainly, and I'll get to see both the recordings you made and the conclusions from your regular debriefing, but it helps me a lot to have an eyewitness run-down. I'd appreciate hearing . . . well, your impressions. Of the Web. Of what we're up against."
Kara shrugged. "I don't know what I could say that you don't know already. I'm really not sure what we learned today that we haven't known since the battle here two years ago." She paused, frowning. "There was one thing I wanted to make special mention of. There were times when I was moving around on the planet alone . . . and Web machines were moving around too, in easy range, but they ignored me. Didn't even look at me, as near as I could tell."
"That's interesting."
"I thought so. I don't know what it means, but it seems like a, well, a weakness, maybe. Something we can exploit. I got the distinct impression that they are so wedded to the idea of lots and lots of parts working together as a whole, they tend to neglect individuals. They may not even think of individuals the way we do. Maybe that means they tend to overlook them."
"That seems a little farfetched."
"Oh, I don't know. It's like you might overlook a couple of scraps of metal lying on the landing deck where you know damned well you parked your flitter. The pieces could be a very important part of your flitter's magdrive train, but you tend to see the flitter's absence, not the pieces' presence."
"Interesting analogy," Vic said.
Kara reached out one slim hand, holding it above a contact plate on the table. "May I?"
"Of course."
At her mental command, a patch of skin centered on the heel of her palm hardened into a peripheral contact plate, and she brought it down onto the black translucence of the table's receiver pad. She felt the thrill of a solid link, gave a second command, and waited as her download trickled through to the AI controlling this compartment's electronics.
There was a flicker in the air above the table, and then the image coalesced, showing the surface of Core D9837, and the ragged, double-beamed spiral of the Great Annihilator in the sky. In several brief scenes and uneven leaps, she took him through a sketch of the battle, with special attention lavished on the huge, floating pyramid.
"I'm sure you've already seen this," she told him.
"I was following the op realtime," he told her. "Through the data you were relaying to Ops." The bald words could not—quite—mask the emotion behind them. He'd been worried. Well, so had she.
"This pyramid thing," she said, pointing at the holographic image. "It's new. Or, at least, it's something we haven't run across before. I don't remember seeing anything quite like this at Nova Aquila. It might be primarily a spacecraft design, but I had the impression it was just as comfortable on a planetary surface . . . or floating above it, rather."
"We haven't really seen how they fight on a planet," Vic said, eyes narrowing as he considered the image. "In fact, I think our assumption has been all along that they tend to operate mostly in space."
"Not entirely true," Kara reminded him. "We've seen them entering and leaving stars."
"Yes. And when they have that kind of technology, it makes you wonder what they could possibly want something as paltry as a planet for."
"Raw materials, most likely," Kara replied.
"Maybe." He pointed into the image, indicating the distant black and silver towers. "Of course, if this architecture is theirs, it suggests they do still use planets for habitation."
She shook her head. "I never got close to those, but my impression is they weren't inhabited so much as used."
"Ruins of some other race that used to live there?"
She frowned. "I don't think so. Core D9837 is a rogue, remember. Its star, if it even ever had one, must have been swallowed up by a black hole a good many millions of years ago." That, at least, was the prevailing theory of the planetologists aboard Gauss, who'd suggested that the barren world's high velocity through the Core was the result of its being ejected when its star perished. "And the environment. Kuso! I don't see how any organic life form could have ever lived in there. Organic molecules would break down . . . " She snapped her fingers. "Like that."
"The current theory," Vic said, "is that the Web's creators evolved on the fringes of the Galactic Core, where the radiation levels weren't so high. They moved into the Core to tap the more freely available energies in there, and along the way they learned how to download their minds into machine bodies."
She shrugged. "Sounds plausible, I suppose."
"Which leaves us still wondering what people who mine stars use planets for."
"Kuso, Dad, we don't know anything about them. These people don't just mine stars. They herd them into great, gokking chorus lines and drop them into giant black holes! As far as I can tell, planets are nothing more than inconveniences to them."
"It certainly seems unlikely that machines that live in space, if live is the right word, would have any use for buildings," Vic pointed out.
Kara nodded. "My guess was that those structures might be the upper works of factories or other underground facilities, maybe built that way to shield them against the ambient radiation. I know that as we kept killing their combat machines, more kept appearing from underground, like we were up against an inexhaustible supply. Maybe they use planets, and the raw materials they offer, as sites for manufacturing their machines." She paused. "There's also the N
aga to think about. The fact that they seemed to have been designed to convert planets into more convenient concentrations of raw material for the Web."
"True," Vic said quietly. "Though we obviously still don't know all there is to know about that."
"We'd damn well better find out."
Two years ago, shortly before the Battle of Nova Aquila, Dev Cameron's probing of the Web concentration at the Galactic Core had demonstrated that the long-mysterious Naga were originally, long, long ago, biomachine constructs controlled by the Web. Humanity had first encountered the Naga almost a century before, when they'd attacked human structures—cities, sky-els, anything with high concentrations of pure metal—on several worlds within the Shichiju. For years, humans had called them Xenophobes and waged a desperate and relentless war of extermination against creatures that, in fact, had been only marginally aware of humans and were inherently unable even to conceive of intelligent beings other than Self. In 2541, however, after numerous failures and the loss of millions of lives, Dev Cameron had finally managed to establish communications with them.
What had followed had changed the course both of history and of human technology. It was discovered that the Naga were chemists extraordinaire, that they acted in some ways like extremely complex serially linked computers, and that they could analyze and pattern any material, including human tissue, and even nanotechnically alter it to improve its function. At Mu Herculis, during the Confederation Rebellion, Dev Cameron had accidentally entered into a symbiotic relationship with a planetary Naga, initiating an exchange that had ultimately led to a far better understanding of those creatures.
Symbiosis with the Naga had eventually become commonplace, and it was becoming more so all the time. Twenty-five years ago, most human-machine interfaces had been carried out through cephlinks, electronic devices nanotechnically grown inside the human brain. With the help of the alien DalRiss and their mastery of biological processes at a molecular level, a single cell from a planetary Naga that had had contact with humans could be trained to enter a human body, where it served as an organic neural cephlink . . . and far more. The result was a symbiont like Kara herself, with a Naga Companion riding her central nervous system that could facilitate her union with machines and with other humans. Xenosymbiotic biotech, it was called, and some hundreds of millions of humans—most of them in the Confederation—had already received Companions and become what many claimed was a new and more advanced type of human.