Warstrider: All Six Novels and An Original Novella

by Ian Douglas

  "Old idea," Daren said with a tight smile. "That was outdated centuries ago. Parasites have to be specialized, yeah. And the traditional idea was always that when a parasite learns to live off of its host species, life gets easier for it. It's true that some forms lose a lot of adaptations for getting along in the outside world because they simply don't need them. A tapeworm, for instance, is nothing much more than a head with jaws to hang onto the inner surface of the host's gut. The rest of it, all several meters' worth, is body segments that detach one by one, pass out of the host's body, and serve to reproduce the beast by hatching out new parasites inside new hosts that happen to ingest them. It's not quite that simple, of course. Most parasitic species actually have fairly complex life cycles, some of them extremely so, requiring a large number of successive, species-specific hosts. Anyway, on the face of things, intelligence simply isn't something that you would expect a parasite to need.

  "But we've learned that there is intense competition among parasitic species for host living space, just as there is among other species . . . and any time you have competition, there's the chance that it will foster, well, anything that will give the species an evolutionary edge in the race. Back to those terrestrial wasps."

  "What are you," Gresham asked. "An expert on parasitic wasps?"

  "My doctoral download was on terrestrial insects, yes," Daren said. "Especially social forms, and that included the Hymenoptera, even though not all wasps are social insects. Anyway, there's one kind of wasp that lays several eggs on a host caterpillar. All but one hatch early and cruise through the caterpillar's body killing every other parasitic wasp larva they find. That ensures that when the last egg hatches, the larva has no competition from other species."

  "That's not intelligence," Kara pointed out.

  "No, that's adaptation," Daren agreed. "Intelligence would be another kind of adaptation and a useful one if evolved in a hostile, high-competition environment. Hell, scientists are still arguing over whether or not you can even call intelligence a survival trait, since the technology that comes out of it does seem to get us into increasingly difficult situations.

  "The Gr'tak, though, are different," he continued. "We haven't learned much about their life cycle yet . . . and we can't even begin to speculate about how they evolved to where they are today. But we have learned how they're put together."

  He gestured at the floating, three-D image of the Gr'tak hanging above the conference table. "The largest part of the organism, that high-standing arch, is what they call a 'receiver.' That's the main host, the foundation for the rest. Now, these three organisms on the back. They look like flat, black plastic bags or oversized leeches. Those are external parasites, and the Gr'tak refer to them as 'greaters.' Those independent flying creatures, like big insects, are called 'lessers.' They, actually, are parasites of the greaters. They live inside the greaters' bodies and emerge through those holes in its back. As near as we can tell, the lessers are kind of like mobile scouts for the whole organism, flying around the area, checking out the surroundings, and flying back to report. There's a fourth parasite, something they call a 'deeper.' We're not sure what that is like, actually, though we think that that thing like a tree with very skinny branches growing out of the top might be a part of it. Deepers live inside the receiver. They may serve as an intermediary for the greaters and the receiver, and we're pretty sure they're important in the reproductive cycle."

  "How do these things reproduce?" Katya wanted to know.

  "Haven't sorted that out yet," Daren said.

  "We're working on it," Taki added. "The greaters share a certain symmetry with the receivers, and we think that's because the greaters and the receivers are two different sexes of the same organism, though there's so much room for misunderstanding here, we could easily be mistaken about that. We do know that the reproductive systems of all four species are very closely interconnected. We think the young of the next generation already carry their symbionts when they're born."

  "The DalRiss started out as parasites, didn't they?" Mishima said. "Is this the fashion trend of the Galaxy, now?"

  Gresham laughed. "What's next, intelligent tapeworms?"

  "The DalRiss fusion arose from a symbiotic relationship," Dev pointed out. "Possibly some parasitism was involved in their early history, but from what we've been able to learn, the dominant Riss organisms started off feeding on the larger Dal creatures, which were big, herd-dwelling, six-legged grazers, but they provided a survival advantage as well, probably by helping the Dal spot dangerous predators.

  "With the Gr'tak, the relationship is deeper, and a lot stranger. The lessers probably started off as outright parasites of the greaters, while the greaters may have started out as parasites, or they could have been part of a sexual dependency, like male angler fish, on Earth. Maybe they both represent part of a more complex life cycle. You know, the parasite lives as a larva in one host, then gets passed to a different host where it matures into something else. Somewhere along the line, though, the cycle of each of the four got so wrapped up with the reproductive cycles of the others that now none of the four can reproduce without the active participation of other three. The receivers appear to be what we call a parasex of the greaters, same species but with a much different morphology."

  "You think they developed in a hostile environment, though?" Vic asked. "That that was what forced them to evolve intelligence?"

  "I'm not sure I see what other explanation there could be," Daren said. "My working hypothesis now is that they've evolved from several codependent species inhabiting littoral zones on their original homeworld."

  "Littoral zones?" Mishima asked.

  "Coastal areas. Specifically, salt marshes, swamps, tidal zones, places like that. They're not really amphibious, but they do prefer wet environments, high humidity. That miniature world we visited is a weird cross between a sauna bath and a greenhouse. They like it at forty degrees or more and often conduct business from their wading pools. And that kind of environment is often a Darwinian forcer. That's a place with lots of competition for limited resources, and lots of other species on the lookout for a meal."

  "This is all quite interesting," Mishima said with a carefully shuttered expression. "I, and my government, of course, are most concerned, however, in what has brought these creatures here."

  "That seems pretty obvious," Dev said. "It's in the report I uploaded onto the Net last week. They were victims of the Web. Like the DalRiss."

  "But this happened a long time ago, right?" Gresham asked.

  "We're still working on their concept of time and how they measure it," Dev admitted. "But if we're on the right track, the Web showed up in their home system and turned their star into a nova well over four thousand years ago. We think their home star was spinward and coreward of Sol, out beyond Nova Aquila. Another in the Aquilan Cluster, in fact."

  One of the more haunting mysteries of astronomy had been the odd fact that a disproportionate number of novae, historically, had appeared in a single tiny patch of the sky as seen from Earth . . . roughly in the direction of the constellation Aquila, the Eagle. During a single, forty-year period early in the twentieth century, twenty-five percent of all of the recorded novae had appeared within an area measuring one quarter of one percent of the entire sky. Two had appeared there in one year alone—1936—and Nova Aquila, in 1918, had been the brightest recorded exploding star in three hundred years, a dazzling jewel-point outshining every star in the heavens except Sirius.

  That clustering in time had been an odd, statistical anomaly, of course, since the stars involved ranged from relatively close to extremely distant, and it was chance that had the wavefronts of all of those stars arrive in the vicinity of Earth in the same four-decade period. But that anomaly had called astronomers' attention to the disproportionate number of novae in that one direction. Not until Dev—downloaded into the DalRiss explorer fleet—reached Nova Aquila had the truth been suspected, that many of those stars, if not all, had
been deliberately exploded by the entities humans knew as the Web. Apparently, the Web was working toward a specific agenda, moving out from the Galactic Core where they'd first appeared along a grand spiral, following one of the Galaxy's spiral arms out into the stellar hinterlands. They'd been slowly approaching Sol's position in space for millennia, coming from the direction of Aquila, Ophiuchus, and Serpens.

  "They've been traveling since something like 1500 B.C.E.," Taki said. She shook her head slowly, wonderingly. "They left the fiery wreck of their home planet a thousand years before Confucius was alive on Earth. They have been wandering for that long."

  "Looking for what?" Gresham wanted to know. "How many of these Gr'tak ships are there, anyway?"

  "The fleet is . . . large," Dev admitted. Sholai had told him it consisted of ten thousand ships, but he'd not yet admitted that officially. So far, only a few hundred had arrived at High Frontier, and he wanted to give them a chance to get reunited and to gather in stragglers before passing such alarming news on to others.

  Particularly to the Imperials, who were already nervous about so many strangers turning up on the borders of the Shichiju.

  "What weapons do they have?" Mishima demanded. "What new technology?"

  "We're still looking at that question, Ambassador," Katya said.

  "Their move into space was apparently prompted by a prevalence of comets in their home system," Dev pointed out. "I've . . . lived some of their remote history. Civilization fell a number of times when comets or small asteroids hit their world. They never fought wars among themselves, apparently. The only weapons they developed were laser banks designed to protect their planet from infalling debris."

  "Pah." Mishima made a dismissive gesture. "We have the same ourselves already, on Luna." He was referring to Fudo-Myoo, the huge arrays of solar-power beam weapons based on Earth's moon; deployed in the late twenty-first century against the remote but deadly chance of a comet impact on Earth such as the one that had annihilated the dinosaurs sixty-five million years earlier, the gigajoule laser and particle beam system had never been used . . . though it remained a formidable part of Earth's defenses.

  Dev studied Mishima. The ambassador looked troubled, his image frowning with the blank, far-away look that generally meant the person was accessing his personal RAM, or listening to some private message relayed through his Companion. No, Dev reminded himself, Mishima was Kansai no Otoko, a "Man of Completion," a member of the Dai Nihon political-social-religious party advocating human purity and a single, united government for all Mankind. He would have one of the old-fashioned cephlinks, not an isoro Companion.

  "Mr. Ambassador?" Katya said. "Are you all right?"

  His face cleared, but he still looked troubled. "Please excuse me," he said. "There is . . . something most urgent I must attend to." His image vanished from the virtual setting.

  "I wonder what that was all about?" Daren said.

  But Dev was aware of something new, a quickening in the flow of information around him. Exactly what he sensed of that information was difficult to express in words, but living and moving within the electronic environment of the Net was often described in metaphor and simile, with the informational matrix likened to a sea, vast, three-dimensional, and alive with powerful currents of moving data and flashing, myriad schools of fish representing individual communications packets. Had the metaphor been given form and substance, Dev knew he would have just seen vast and crowded schools of fish in the clear, sunlit shallows wheel about in an explosion of color and activity . . . then swell in numbers as new schools came swarming in out of the deeps beyond the shadowy reef in the distance.

  Reaching out, he sampled one of the nearer "fish. . . ."

  . . . at this time still do not know where the intruders are coming from, but it is feared that these small vessels are representatives of the so-called "Web Intelligence" that was decisively defeated at Nova Aquila two years ago. . . .

  Surprise jolted Dev, followed swiftly by a stab of fear. The language was Nihongo, the speaker a well-known ViRnews mede broadcasting on the Net from Singapore Synchorbital.

  From Earth . . . and the very seat of the Imperial government.

  Swiftly, Dev sampled another incoming packet of communications . . . then another . . . then a hundred more in rapid succession. Most were coded military or government communiques, but others were being uploaded in the clear and relayed throughout the human network via I2C.

  "Excuse me," Dev told the others. "Something is happening. Something . . . very dangerous, I think. I've got to leave, too."

  "What is it, Dev?" Katya wanted to know. She'd picked up on the urgency in his voice, put it together with Mishima's sudden departure, and sounded worried.

  "Earth is under attack," he told his startled listeners. "It sounds like the Web has come out to play."

  Before they could respond, Dev was gone.

  Chapter 14

  No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine owne were; any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.

  —Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, XVII

  JOHN DONNE

  C.E. 1624

  Dev uploaded from the University of Jefferson, transmitting himself as a burst of digitized information across the thirty-six-light-year I2C linkage from the 26 Draconis system to Eridu, Chi Draconis V. From there, he routed to a commercial channel, waited 312 microseconds for the passage of a particularly large block of priority data flagged for ViRcom routing, then uploaded once again across the twenty-nine-light-year I2C link to Chiron. From Chiron, after another brief pause, it was just four and a half light years to Sol—less than the blink of an eye for the quantum-paired electron arrays of the communications facilities at Alpha Centauri A III and Earth.

  His incoming pattern was routed through the commercial traffic buffers at the communications array on Luna, where Dev waited for several seconds, surveying the electronic ground. If message traffic had been growing stronger and more urgent than normal at New America, almost fifty light years away, it was frantic here. Reaching out with the downloaded pattern of his mind, Dev sampled some of the messages flooding through near-Earth space.

  " . . . God, I've never seen anything like it! There must be hundreds of them coming out of K-T space, and they're filling the sky. . . ."

  "Negative! Negative! It's not K-T space. We don't know how they're arriving, but they're coming in fast. "

  "Mayday! Mayday! Am under attack by unknown forces! They're just coming out of empty space, more ships than I can count! . . ."

  "Imperial Fleet Command Control Center, this is Perimeter Defense Facility Evening Calm! The enemy is materializing out of empty space from the direction of Aquila. Bearing right ascension, one-nine hours, three-five minutes, zero-four seconds, declination plus one-four point two degrees, range three-one-point-seven a.u. They appear to be moving in-system at high acceleration. Can't determine yet whether their target is Earth or the Sun. . . ."

  "Hello! Hello! Is anyone reading me? Hello! . . ."

  "Mayday! Mayday! This is the transport Yoku Maru. I've been hit by something! Power out. Life support down. I'm tumbling and losing pressure. Can anybody hear me? . . . "

  Earth's solar system was filled with spaceborne traffic, some military, most of it commercial shipping. Earth and Dai Nihon, after all, were the hub of a titanic commercial empire as well as a military one, an empire spanning the entire Shichiju and reaching all the way out into the Periphery states. As emergency and priority radio and I2C traffic flashed from ship to ship and among the various planetary and deep space communications facilities across the system, panic was spreading.

  "Perimeter Defense Facility Evening Calm, this is Imperial Fleet Command Control Center. Can you
identify the attackers? Over!"

  "Cee-Three, Evening Calm. It's the Web. Got to be. It's just like the attack at Nova Aquila . . . !"

  A large portion of the human race had seen, had experienced the Nova Aquila battle two years before by linking into the computer-communications network that interconnected all of the worlds inhabited by Man, and downloading the event—as seen through scanners and sensory suites throughout the Imperial–Confederation Combined Fleet—as it happened.

  It had been a good many centuries since the advent of telecommunications—com satellites and old-fashioned two-D television—had brought the experience of war into civilian homes; since the development of ViRealities and direct cephlink feeds, news reporting had become a far more immediate, a more personal way of reaching people with current events. Even deep within the inner worlds of the Shichiju, where few citizens used the there-unpopular Naga Companions, virtually every citizen save the three percent or so of nullheads and technophobes had immediate access to online feeds from one or another of the news services, government, commercial, and private. As during the Battle of Nova Aquila, Dev could feel more and more citizens across the Shichiju linking in as the urgent communications from the outer reaches of the Solar System spread the panic further and further abroad.

  And, as before, he could feel the Overmind stirring.

  Overmind was Dev's term for that giant, half-sleeping intelligence that still lay, quiescent, beneath the crisscrossing babble of communications on the Net, a noncorporeal intelligence derived from the complex interconnectivity of all human communications. It had come into being during Nova Aquila, when a critical threshold of minds had actively joined the Net. He'd not been able to reach it during the battle, though in some still ill-defined way he'd been aware of having been a part, a very small part, of the entire intelligence.