by Ian Douglas
If the DalRiss, after some twenty-five years of experience with Dev, didn't understand human politics, then what would these alien newcomers think about it? As human and DalRiss ships continued to arrive in-system, the Gr'tak fleet waited silently well beyond the gathering pools of human vessels. Initial contact had already been established, using high speed computers on both sides to begin generating communications protocols. Elements of the Gr'tak language had been recorded; evidently, and fortunately, they used a spoken language and not some more elusive mode of communication like odors or color changes or wig-wagging tentacles. So far, human contact experts had determined that Gr'tak was a group name, either for themselves as a species or for this particular group of ships, and that the name seemed to include a number of allied intelligent species. The assumption now was that the basic unit in Gr'tak society was the taak, a plural term that seemed to imply a union of diverse beings or minds working to a common goal. There was speculation that the Gr'tak might actually be representatives of some kind of interstellar federation. The information downloaded into human AI systems so far, however, was far too vague and fragmented to allow anything more than speculation.
With luck, they would learn more when they established a direct Naga linkage.
The Gr'tak ships, Dev noted, were huge, sleek, aesthetically pleasing things, all curves and smooth lines. They were also large, some a kilometer long, and with vast arrays of lighted ports among the towers and bulbous swellings near their prows that suggested vast cities. Oddly, some of the larger vessels looked less like spacecraft than like space stations of some kind; several were obviously planetoids or small moons that had been partially or completely excavated within and looked more like mobile space colonies. Was that, Dev wondered, a reflection of some quirk of Gr'tak psychology? Or did they mean, as some exchanges on the Net were speculating, that the Gr'tak fleet was in fact a migration of all or part of their civilization?
There was no way of knowing, short of learning how to talk with them directly.
One aspect of Gr'tak technology was clear enough. They'd apparently never developed faster-than-light travel, though their power plants reportedly generated thrust enough to take them to something like 0.5 c. That was fast enough to cover the distances between the stars within reasonable times, but too slow to make much use of General Relativity and time dilation. Either the Gr'tak were from some as yet undiscovered habitable world within a few light years of High Frontier, or they went in for generational travel. Some observers had already dismissed the Gr'tak as relative primitives and discounted them as a threat to the standoff between Empire and Confederation. In terms of weapons or new ship technology, that was probably true, but Dev knew better than to assume that they would have nothing to contribute to human science. The DalRiss had proven that science and technology could evolve along radically different routes with different cultures. The Gr'tak might well have insights into some branches of science that so far had been overlooked by both Imperial and Confed researchers; even if all human technology was superior to the newcomers, though, the mere fact that this was a different people, with different arts, philosophies, history, and ways of looking at things was enough to guarantee that they would have an impact on human civilization.
Which, of course, was why so many warships were gathering here. Neither side in the ongoing human, political struggle was willing for the other side to have unchallenged access to the alien newcomers. To ignore what they might have to offer was tantamount to national suicide.
"Dev?" a woman's voice said over the open communications link he'd been maintaining with the Karyu. "We're nearly ready to send the pod across."
"Very well," he said. "I'll be downloading in a moment."
The woman, he knew, was Dr. Taki Oe, a respected xenobiologist from the University of Jefferson . . . and also, coincidentally, a close friend of his son. Dev was a little disappointed that Taki had been the one to call him and not Daren, but he'd not really been expecting his son to break the uncomfortable silence they shared.
Dev still felt strange . . . and not a little awkward around the young man who'd been his son by Katya Alessandro. He'd never seen the boy in his own, human body, never been able to establish anything like a close relationship with him. In point of fact, Daren Cameron struck Dev as something of a prig, self-centered, rude, and abrupt, though his records indicated he was excellent in his field. A full doctor—he'd downloaded the requisite background by the time he was seventeen and submitted his doctoral thesis by nineteen—he'd already gained a reputation for himself with his studies of the Communes of Dante.
As nearly as he could tell, Daren was as uncomfortable still with his father as Dev was with his son. Dev's return from deep space two years before, bearing warning of the Web threat at Nova Aquila, had been an unsettling, even painful experience for them both, one that neither of them had yet fully adjusted to. It helped, a little, that both Daren and Taki were not really here at High Frontier but were exercising their telepresences via an I2C link-up from the Carl Friedrich Gauss at far-off Nova Aquila.
He made another check of the crisscrossing streams of electronic information, then spoke briefly with his DalRiss hosts. He would be using a body for this expedition, a DalRiss construct, a living creature tailored by them to serve as a mobile repository for his intelligence. He'd used similar forms before during his explorations with his hosts, though he still had some trouble getting used to its hexapod stance and all-round vision. Donning the body was as simple as downloading the program that was his conscious mind.
A short time later, he was inside a small transport shuttle, a wingless, mag-driven pod boosting at low acceleration from the Confederation carrier Karyu toward the largest of the alien vessels. With him in the crowded cabin were two sleek, humanoid forms, hubots teleoperated by researchers many light years distant. Taki Oe, and Dev's son.
"I'm impressed that we've been able to pick up as much about them as we have," Taki was saying. "We certainly haven't had much to go on so far. We don't even know what they look like."
"That's because all of the real communication so far has been between our AI systems and what we presume are their computers," Dev said, using the radio link that he was sharing with the two hubots, rather than slower and clumsier verbal means. "Since both of us work digitally, with a binary numeric system and with what appears to be massively parallel processing, we had a lot in common starting out."
"A common number system," Taki said.
"Yes. A common number system. Common voltages and electronic variables. We were able to arrive at a common system for measuring time, based on the radio frequency we were using. We also agreed on a general frame of reference, on codes meaning 'you,' 'us,' 'we,' 'they,' and so on. The word samples they've given us have already been analyzed by the best expert AI linguistics system we have, which would be the one at the Terran Hegemony Language Studies Group at Singapore. Of course, since we already went through a lot of this with the DalRiss a quarter century ago, it's not like we're breaking new ground."
"Maybe you're not," Daren's hubot said quietly. There was the slightest of challenges in Daren's tone of voice.
"Do you have a problem, Daren?"
"I'm just not sure of why Taki and me are here when they have you."
"I think we're both still a little, um, awed," Taki said. "You've got the whole Net to draw on, and it leaves us feeling a little slow."
Dev had the impression that Taki wasn't speaking for herself so much as she was for Daren.
"I have the same resources you do," he said bluntly. "I might be a little faster. But you have advantages I don't."
"Such as?" Daren prompted belligerently.
"You're not alone. . . ."
The next few minutes passed in uncomfortable silence, as they watched the armada arrayed on the shuttle's viewall. Dev had hoped that their destination would be one of the sleek and beautiful ship-forms gathered in the Gr'tak zone, but as soon as the pod's vector was automaticall
y handed over to a Gr'tak controller, it was clear that they were heading for one of the asteroid ships, a gnarled, dusty-looking body very nearly as black as coal, a rough and cratered potato shape measuring ten kilometers in length by perhaps half that in width. They could see the rock's slow rotation as shadows shifted across the uneven surface. The rotational gravity inside, at least for structures close to the surface, would be just over one standard gravity at the equator, a figure that would dwindle away to nothing as one moved nearer the rotational poles. They were approaching it from its dark side, which meant it was more visible by the stars it occulted than by any sunlight reflected from its ebon surface. Lights, whole constellations of them, gleamed from tight-knit clusters around both poles of rotation. As the shuttle continued closing with the object, Dev could see that they were being drawn toward the asteroid's south pole.
Moment followed moment in silence. Electronic communications protocols had already been worked out between the respective computer systems, but it seemed a little strange to be approaching another ship without a constant stream of requests, commands, and permissions-to-board. Dev sensed instead the quiet whisper of data exchanges, the alien code slightly slower than human and somewhat richer and more elegant in the way it was packed.
An intense blue light winked on ahead, and below, a portion of the black surface yawned open to give entry to a large, violet-lit docking or receiving bay. Under automatic control, the shuttle pod skimmed through the slowly moving opening, gentling in for a docking within a webwork of gantries and ship cradles. He'd expected the bay to pressurize, but instead, the cradle that received them lifted them swiftly through a long set of smaller hatchways and a succession of locks. An explosive gust of incoming air rocked the craft once . . . then again as pressures outside rose to well over 1.4 bar. One side of the chamber they were in slid open, and their shuttle was trundled forward into green and violet-white light.
They were . . . outside once more.
Or so it seemed. Beyond the gleaming ceramic shell of the wall they'd just emerged from was something more like tropical jungle than the interior of a spacecraft, with moist dirt and clots of leaves and dead vegetation underfoot, with a violet-white sky and growing, moving things that must have been the Gr'tak analogue of trees . . . though they looked more like inverted jellyfish, with stiff and writhing tentacles extending skyward from billowing skirts of translucent, gelatinous membranes.
"Air pressure at nearly one and a half atmospheres," Taki reported. "Rotational gravity . . . I make it two tenths of a G up here. We're pretty close to the axis, though. Down by the equator, it'll be higher. Mix . . . urn. Thirty-one percent oxygen. That's pretty rich. High CO2, almost six hundred ppm. Sixty-eight percent nitrogen."
"Thirty-one percent O2?" Daren asked. "Damn. If we sneeze we're going to start one hell of a fire!"
"Not necessarily," Dev said. "The high CO2 will have a dampening effect. Still, things are going to be more flammable. I wonder how they deal with electrical storms?"
"In this colony," Taki pointed out, "they don't have to."
"Yeah, but if this atmosphere matches that of their home-world," Daren said, "I'll bet their civilization had a bitch of a time learning to tame fire. Just chipping flints would have gotten them into trouble."
The trio emerged from the shuttle's airlock, two hubots followed by Dev's flat, six-legged organic suit. Taki carried a half-meter-long, silver-gray canister under her hubot's arm.
Water dripped from the vegetation . . . if that was what the jellyfish-things were. The air was steamy with humidity, and Dev had to pause once and trigger a jet of cold air to clear his artificial body's optical sensors.
The intense illumination filtered down from a brilliant line of light scratched across the zenith. As the planetoid rotated about that glowing axis, centrifugal force created an out-is-down gravity; the opposite side of this inside-out world was spread like a curving map across the sky beyond the light, almost lost in the thick atmosphere's haze.
"A lot like Dante," Daren remarked as they stopped in a small clearing. "Not as much sulfur dioxide, and the CO2 is lower. But the temperature's about the same, at forty-two degrees."
"I think we can assume this is a match for their home environment," Taki said.
"If these people have been traveling for a long time at sublight," Dev suggested, "maybe they just brought their world with them."
"There was still an original homeworld," Daren said. "Somewhere. But they would have built this colony to match their—"
"Watch out, everybody," Taki said. "We're being watched."
Dev's all-round vision had already caught the movement as something slipped through the air into the clearing. His first impression was of a very large insect, something like a wasp, something like a dragonfly, with numerous features and details utterly unlike either. The wingspan, as nearly as Dev could tell when the wings were reduced to a nearly invisible blur, was nearly a full meter, while the creature's body was as thick as a human arm and nearly twice as long. A pair of openings, like wet mouths, pulsed to either side of the elongated head just beneath paired, bulbous, jewel-faceted eyes. Dev thought that those mouths must be part of the creature's respiratory apparatus, gulping down large amounts of air to fuel the furious beat of those wings. On Earth, insects were limited in how big they could grow by the fact that they used spiracles for respiration rather than lungs. The higher concentration of oxygen in this place, coupled with the likelihood that this creature possessed something like lungs, explained how "insects" could reach such a size; Dev had read that Earth's atmosphere during the Carboniferous had reached thirty-five percent oxygen, allowing the evolution of dragonflies with half-meter wingspans.
The creature's head attached to the body between those enormous eyes; a smooth and slightly rounded crest thrust back from this, however, so that the entire head was larger than three human fists stacked together. Instead of legs, a cluster of slender tendrils nervously twitched beneath the eyes, but Dev couldn't tell if they were mouth parts, sensory organs, manipulators, or all three. The abdomen, again, long and slender like a dragonfly's, was flexible, tapering, and tightly coiled; when Daren's hubot moved slightly, the hovering creature drifted back half a meter and the abdomen uncoiled, then recoiled in a flash, demonstrating a marvelous precision of strength and control. A manipulative organ of some sort, like a tentacle or a hand?
"Is this one of our hosts?" Taki wondered aloud. "Or part of the native fauna?"
"One of our hosts, I should think," Dev replied. "In a closed, tightly controlled environment like this, I doubt that the wildlife wanders around free."
"How do you know that?" Daren said sharply. "This could be the equivalent of a domesticated pet. Or a gene-tailored, roving eye. Or—"
Something moved ahead, a thrashing in the shadowed undergrowth. The vegetation parted then, and another creature moved into the clearing. This time, there was no doubt, in Dev's mind, at least, that this was one of the Gr'tak.
One? Or more than that? The main body of the thing was easily four meters tall, a bulk of gray-brown flesh that towered above the three human machines. Beyond the initial impression of bulk and mass, though, it was at first hard to nail down details of the thing's structure, so little was it like anything in Dev's experience. It was fairly simple in its overall design, a massively large and fleshy base reminiscent of the foot of a conch or some other marine cephalopod, rising in a thick and muscular column of flesh and muscle that looped over sharply at the top, then descended to a smaller, second foot on the body's front end that seemed to incorporate the head as part of its structure. The head grew forward out of the leading edge of the second foot, an oddly bumpy and wrinkled gray ovoid festooned with tendrils, cilia, and prismatic surfaces that might have been various sense organs or manipulative appendages or both. The thing's movement, as it edged its way into the clearing, was almost comically like that of a terrestrial inchworm; the head-foot reached forward in a two-meter stride, then clung to
the ground as the more massive tail-foot glided after it on powerful, muscular contractions.
The creature wore clothing of a sort, a bright pink skirt with rich violet and green ornamentation worked in glistening bands and spirals into the material, open at the top and bottom and girdling the looped body, leaving both feet and the upper part of the arch bare. The only other ornamentation was a gleaming, brass-colored plate or brooch that seemed to be embedded in the thing's thick hide just above and behind the head-foot.
The upper opening of the thing's skirt revealed three meter-long objects, flat, black, and glistening wet, adhering to the top of the arch. At first, Dev took them for some sort of external organs on the creature's body, but then one released its hold at what Dev took to be its leading end, and a blindly questing, circular mouth gaped for a moment before reattaching itself to its large mount. The three black shapes, then, were a trio of glistening creatures like enormous leeches attached to the larger being's dorsal surface, two riding side by side with the third slightly ahead of and overlapping the other two. The upper sides of the riders were pocked with half a dozen fist-sized craters that appeared to be the source of the moisture covering them; a gray and slender, many-branched growth sprouted more than a meter up from the thick skin of the larger creature beneath them, though which organism that structure belonged to, if either, Dev honestly couldn't tell.
Dev immediately had the impression, though, of several creatures working together, the big, arched body ridden by the three leeches in much the same way that a Riss rode a six-legged Dal. The union suggested that the Gr'tak was not an interstellar federation after all, but an evolutionary joining of several sapient species. The hovering insect, Dev noticed, was definitely a part of that superorganism or at least shared a close symbiosis with it. As he watched with fascination, the flyer abruptly darted back to the larger creature, folded up its wings, and vanished into one of the holes in one of the leech-riders with a ripple of glistening black flesh to mark its movement beneath the skin, while another, apparently identical flyer crawled free of a different hole and took to the air with a soft hiss of vibrating, transparent membranes. Dev was put in mind of scout warflyers maintaining a constant CAP around their carrier, serving as early warning for approaching danger, perhaps, as well as a mobile extension of eyes and other sense organs.