Warstrider: All Six Novels and An Original Novella

by Ian Douglas

  "Green Flight," Vaughn said. "With me… break left in three… two… one… mark!"

  The eight Green Flight air-space craft accelerated hard for several seconds, then decelerated even harder, smoothly matching the course and speed of the black, relatively slow-moving mountain ahead. At a steady seven point four kilometers per second, it was closing with the Constitution at an almost stately pace. Depending on the Connie's speed and maneuvering, it would reach the Confederation vessel in about ten more minutes.

  As they dropped into position, the mass loomed half a kilometer distant, its surface utterly black, but shining in places with by the red starlight. Vaughn had thought at first that the object was of a black so absolute that it drank every photon of incident light. At this close range, however, he could see the surface shifting and morphing as if with its own, radically alien life, and changes to the surface texture and shape managed to reflect, now and again, an oily, reddish sheen.

  "Okay…" Hallman called out into an uncomfortable silence. Now what?"

  "Reduce speed," Vaughn ordered. "See if that thing will match us."

  "Sure," Lederer added. "They wouldn't dare run us down!"

  But as the eight ascraft slowed from 7400 meters per second to 7300 meters per second, the black mountain began closing at 100 mps. .. relentless and unswerving.

  "Okay!" Vaughn shouted. "Boost it! Boost it! Match velocities!"

  "Well that worked well," Palmer said.

  Vaughn bit off a sharp curse. Their maneuver had had exactly zero impact on the alien mass.

  "Okay," he said after a moment more. "There's still one thing we can try."

  "We can blast that thing with Hellrands!" Wheeler said.

  "No!" Vaughn replied. "No. That's a last resort. Everybody else… hang back."

  "Vaughn!" Vanderkamp called. "What are you doing?"

  "Stopping a flying mountain," Vaughn replied. "Stand by.…"

  He slowed his ascraft's velocity, and again the oncoming naga fragment closed… fifty meters per second… twenty meters per second… five…

  The fragment completely blocked half of the entire sky, now. It was also, Vaughn noticed, morphing in shape from something typical of a natural planetoid—roughly potato shaped—to something more like a bowl. It was flattening out along its line of travel, the edges curving forward, the center forming a depression directly in front of him. As Vaughn's ascraft moved forward relative to the thing's motion, he had the feeling that it was about to swallow him whole.

  "Vaughn!" Vanderkamp called. "Hold position!"

  For a moment, fear warred with the hot, out-of-control yokie insanity pounding now through his veins.

  "No! Wait!" he called. "It's okay! Let me do this.…"

  There was, he was surprised to note, a thin trickle of cold rationality mingled with the ragged emotions of combat. He had his own Naga implant, a few grams of alien computronium inside his skull, linked in to his cerebral implant. Most New American warstrider jackers did. Normally, he wasn't aware of it. Communication with the material was on an almost unconscious level, and had more to do with processing incoming data than it did with communicating with alien machines.

  But he could feel something now… a drawing… a calling, and it seemed to be emanating from the black mountain ahead.

  Gently, he eased his Gyrfalcon forward, reshaping its prow into a mushroom shape, a shield to cushion the shock. Both mountain and Gyrfalcon were moving now together, hurtling toward the Constitution at 7.5 kilometers per second. Vaughn was jockeying his ascraft's controls through his link, however, gently, gently adjusting his velocity relative to the Naga fragment so that it was overtaking him by a meter a second… half a meter per second… ten centimeters per second…

  Warstrider touched Naga… a kiss.

  With his shield up against the soft and somewhat yielding surface of the black fragment, Vaughn applied forward thrust, pushing against the mountain… pushing hard.…

  Nothing happened.

  The inward struggle now was fear against that cold rationality. Somehow, the sento yokubo chaos and shrill, clamoring urgency had somehow evaporated. The fear rose, gibbering, as the mountain began to fold in over him, wrapping him in an inky, pitch-black embrace.

  "Bravo Squadron, Bravo Squadron!" he called. "Do you copy?"

  There was no response, and Vaughn realized in that instant that he was now utterly and completely alone, that he was buried inside the hurtling black mountain of computronium and cut off from the warstriders outside.

  And in the next moment, he felt the walls of his trapped warstrider yielding… then dissolving as the Naga material began passing through his hull matrix and filling the ascraft's interior. Oily black liquid poured into his cockpit… was passing through the material of his flight suit.

  He screamed, thrashing as the material, flooding his suit, began entering his body.…

  7

  "The machines are gaining ground on us; day by day we are becoming more subservient to them.… (T)hat the time will come when the machines will hold the real supremacy over the world and its inhabitants is what no person of a truly philosophic mind can for a moment question."

  "Darwin Among the Machines"

  Samuel Butler

  C.E. 1863

  "My God!" Wheeler cried. "It swallowed him!…"

  "Fire!" Vanderkamp shouted. "All units, commence fire!"

  Colonel Rudy Griffin watched in horror as the neatly formulated plan to peacefully insert the squadron into the alien AI nebula dissolved into chaos. No plan of battle survives contact with the enemy ran von Moltke's famed aphorism… and evidently that held for attempts to avoid combat as well.

  "Belay that fire order!" Griffin called through the squadron channel, but it was already too late. Half a dozen warstriders blasted away with high-energy particle guns and kinetic-impact cannon; the other squadrons facing the other two Naga fragments opened fire as well. Several of the ascraft held their fire… but then a cloud of silver spheres emerged from some hundreds of the nearest statite structures, swarming toward the human fleet.

  "Sir!" Vanderkamp yelled. "We're under attack!"

  "All units, commence fire," Griffin said, countermanding his own order. "Defend yourselves! Try not to damage the sails or the orbital habs!"

  Maybe, if they kept the collateral damage to a minimum, they would have some room for negotiation. Please, God…

  He checked the nearest of the red dwarf stars, a scant five million kilometers distant. It had already been maneuvered so that its axis of rotation was aligned with the rebel ships dropping into the micro-star nebula. At that distance, it would take between 16 and 17 seconds for light bearing news of the outbreak of fighting to reach it. The jets that would be fired from the red dwarf didn't move at the speed of light, but they came close; call it forty-five seconds to a minute before the Confederation ships could expect a response.…

  Retaliation, he thought, would only be delayed by distance and the slow crawl of light. The aliens had already demonstrated that they were willing to sacrifice some of their infrastructure—the statite sails—in order to hit attackers.

  "Damn it, Rudy," Admiral James Carson said. The two men were floating side by side in the microgravity of Constitution's Command Control Center, watching the sudden flare-up of fighting unfolding within a three-D holographic display. "This wasn't supposed to happen!"

  "I know, Admiral. Look… we have maybe half a minute before they start sniping at us with stars. We need to go deeper."

  "Deeper? What the hell—"

  "Deeper into the nebula, sir! Where they can't use their starmining technology against our warships!"

  Carson's eyes widened. "Not without hitting their own structures. Good thought!" He began snapping off mental orders, and the tiny Confederation fleet began accelerating, dropping deeper through the outer shells of the immense matrioshka cloud.

  Griffin remained focused on his ascraft fighters, as the fighting spread. Attempts to hammer thro
ugh the black Naga matrix of the fragments had so far failed—the semi-liquid stuff seemed to drink energy and absorb projectiles without limit. But the fragments had stopped their advance, at least for the moment.

  The oncoming spheres, however, presented a new and deadly threat. There were simply too many of the things to engage each in turn, and it was obvious that the human defenses were going to be overwhelmed by sheer weight of numbers in very short order.

  More and more of the 104th Regiment's warstriders were engaging the spheres, now. The things didn't appear to have shielding or other protection, and a single kinetic-kill slug was enough to explode one in a dazzling flash of light and hot plasma. Analyses of the radiation loosed by a sphere when it exploded told Griffin what he really didn't want to hear: the detonations carried the 511 keV gamma ray signature of annihilating positrons—the rest mass of an electron multiplied by the speed of light squared. Those spheres carried small amounts of antimatter as warhead payloads.

  According to spectrographic scans of the debris clouds, most of their mass consisted of carbon- and silicon-based computronium, with traces of other elements. That might mean they were also intended for communication… though at the moment they seemed more interested in reaching the fleet's capital ships.

  Swallowing Sergeant Major Vaughn's warstrider whole certainly did not look like an attempt to be conversational.

  "Objects are coming into PD range, sir," a fire-control technician reported.

  "Open fire!" Carson told her. "Keep those things away from the fleet!"

  Each of the capital ships bristled with point defense weapons—both lasers and high-velocity gatling cannon. Within moments, space ahead of the fleet lit up with hundreds of rapidly strobing pulses of dazzling light and hard radiation as the alien spheres flared and vanished in bursts of hot plasma.

  Then an intensely hot plasma jet struck the carrier-battleship Revolution, the bolt fired almost forty seconds earlier from the nearest captive red dwarf. Griffin swore. He'd actually forgotten about that threat, so intent had he been on the far nearer and more numerous antimatter spheres. The matrioshka intelligence had fired the weapon down into the cloud of statite sails, vaporizing several of them and releasing their suspended computronium payloads in a long, long drop into the center of the hypernode cluster.

  But Griffin noticed something else as well. "Interesting."

  "What?" Carson demanded.

  "The aliens are willing to sacrifice a few statites to get at us."

  "They do have a few to spare," Carson replied dryly. "I believe you could call this a massively redundant system."

  "Yes… but they fired at the Revolution, which was higher up among the upper statite shell… not the Independence. Or us."

  "Give them time. They've only taken one shot."

  "They might not take another, Admiral," Griffin replied. "Because we're entering a Bishop ring level."

  Matrioshka brains were defined as multiple shells or layers, one inside another and all surrounding a central star or other energy source—in this case a ruby-glowing micro-star. The outermost shell consisted of statite computronium structures suspended from light sails and interconnected by invisible beams of infrared laser energy. But the next shell in consisted of the giant Bishop ring structures… presumably habitats for unknown billions or trillions of organic beings.

  The Jenkins swarm of habitats just might shield Independence and Constitution from the deadly stellar plasma weapon.

  Griffin and Carson waited, second dragging past second. Sphere weapons continued to detonate ahead, blasting local space with hard radiation, but another bolt from the red dwarf star didn't come. Griffin wondered if that suggested another tactic as well. If the hypernode intelligence sought to protect the rotating habitats, perhaps a threat to those habitats would force them negotiate. He didn't like the idea—in effect holding alien civilians hostage—but the human forces, vastly outnumbered and vastly outmatched in technology, had precious few advantages right now.

  "Have your fighters pull back to protect the fleet," Carson ordered.

  "Yes, sir." Griffin gave the necessary orders. There was some argument from some of the members of Bravo Squadron, a momentary protest that one of their people was trapped inside an alien Naga fragment, but they began moving back toward the Constitution in good order.

  "Tomlinson!" Carson snapped.

  "Yes, sir!" Commander Maureen Tomlinson was head of the Connie's computer department.

  "Let me see the hypernode signals network."

  "Aye, aye, sir. On-screen."

  A faint web of perfectly straight lines, interconnected and crisscrossing everywhere, appeared on the C3 display, linking every visible statite with some thousands of other statites in a vast and complicated network that receded into the hazy black depths of the cluster. From instant to instant, beams winked off while others flashed on, creating the impression of something very much alive and active.

  Something thinking…

  "I want an analysis of those beams," Carson told her, "and a map of enemy fleet dispositions. If their fleet is taking orders from a central location, I want to know where that is."

  Griffin knew what Carson was looking for, but doubted that he would find it. The admiral wanted one target, something that would allow the human ships to end the battle if they destroyed it. "I'm not sure it's going to be as simple as that, Admiral."

  "Someone is coordinating the hypernode's defenses," Carson replied. "Maybe one of these habitats is the enemy's command center. If we can find it, we can kill it.…"

  "Sir," Tomlinson said. "We're not getting any observable signal patterns on the alien laser net."

  "What… none?"

  "No, sir."

  "A central hub of some sort? A control center?"

  "No, sir. The web of lasers seems to be turning the entire cluster into a very powerful neural net. And there's no enemy fleet as such, either."

  "Those spheres…"

  "Obviously robotic weapons, Admiral. They're coming out from the center of the cluster."

  "Then that's where the control center is!" Carson exclaimed. "All ships! Form up on the Constitution! We'll keep moving deeper!"

  But more and more silver spheres were leaking through the Confederation defenses. Hundreds flashed through the overlapping fields of point-defense fire and latching on to the Independence's hull. Interesting. They weren't detonating… but they were accumulating, slipping through the PD barrage in greater and greater numbers. Griffin cold see the long, dark gray hull of the Indie on the three-D display, with masses of silvery flecks gathering in different areas like clusters of barnacles. Each sphere was only between one and two meters in diameter… but swarms of them were latching on to each of the human ships now.

  "Antibodies," Griffin said quietly.

  "What was that?" Carson demanded.

  "They're like antibodies, Admiral. Molecules in the human body that seek out invading organisms—bacteria, for instance—and actually latch on to them."

  The spheres were beginning to pile up on the other human ships as well. The heavy cruiser Porter was completely girdled by them now… and as Griffin watched with sick horror, they exploded in a nova-brilliant flash that tore the New American ship into ragged, spinning halves.

  "So far as I know, Rudy," Carson said quietly, "antibodies don't tear bacteria apart with antimatter explosions."

  "And maybe we have a few tricks that bacteria don't know about," Griffin replied. "Sir, I suggest you tell Connie to track down the control signal that's guiding those spheres, and see if she can hack into their network."

  By "Connie," he meant the AI controlling the Constitution, a powerful artificial intelligence that certainly wasn't in the same league as the hypernode, but which offered the humans the only real chance they had in a head-to-head conflict with an advanced machine intelligence.

  "Parker!" Carson said. Commander Jefferson Parker was the ship's senior cybernetics officer and AI maven in charge of Con
stitution's electronic network. "You heard?"

  "Yes, sir. We're on it.…"

  The red dwarf sun fired again, striking the destroyer Andaman.

  "God!" Carson exclaimed. "I thought we were in the clear.…"

  Griffin was already studying the incoming path of the plasma bolt that had just annihilated the Andaman. "Incredible…"

  "What?"

  "Sir… that line of fire was precise, down to an angle within a ten-thousandth of one degree. They selected exactly the right path that would skim past… damn, eighty-three statites and twelve habitats without hitting any of them."

  "All very laudable, Colonel, I'm sure, but.…"

  "Don't you understand, Admiral? The number of variables that have to be calculated across over five million kilometers and almost a full minute of time, with that many potential structures in the way? The need to predict the future positions of that many moving objects? It's a clue to just how powerful the matrioshka intelligence is!"

  "Well, yes… but we knew that. If we can reach the enemy's command center at the heart of the cluster—"

  "There is no command center, Admiral. No defensive fleet. No enemy HQ."

  "There must be something like caretakers… controllers or technicians—"

  "I doubt that very much, sir."

  "What's controlling the spheres? We're looking for a control signal of some sort.…"

  "They probably coordinate their actions among themselves, sir," Griffin replied. He glanced at Parker, across the C3 compartment, as if to elicit support… but the other officer was leaning back in his chair with his eyes closed, communing with his electronic charges. He shrugged. "What would a mind this powerful need with controllers? It's more than able to look after itself."

  "But the habitats…"

  "I don't know who lives there, Admiral, but I very much doubt that they're calling the shots. Look, I think we're facing off against the real deal, here… a super-AI intellect." Griffin shrugged. "And I think the local SAI has too much on the line right now to risk leaving its own defense to intermediaries."

  Carson seemed to chew on this for a moment. "Okay. Say you're right. Can we use that? Use it to communicate with the thing?"