Warstrider: All Six Novels and An Original Novella

by Ian Douglas

  "I don't know Admiral." Griffin looked at the enlarged image of one of the black mountains, now hovering motionless relative to the fleet. "The AI may already have that in mind."

  * * *

  It took Vaughn a few moments to realize that he wasn't hurt. He was suspended in utter blackness and he couldn't move. It was as though he was imbedded in concrete… except that concrete would not have flowed through the material of his ship utility suit. What was far more disturbing was the sensation that the stuff was somehow moving through his skin.…

  That was, of course, what Nagas did. The first direct contacts with the strange, artificial lifeform had severely traumatized many of the humans who'd experienced it. A Naga fragment wasn't made of traditional living cells, but instead was composed of minute flecks of a carbon-based material each only a few nanometers across, so tiny they could slip right through most materials without even slowing down. The process was well-known and understood. That was how the Naga symbiotes entered the human body and connected with implant hardware.

  Vaughn would have bet anything, though, that the stuff couldn't seep through the solid hull of an ascraft.

  Then he realized that much of that hull was, itself, Naga material set in an ultra-hard, crystalline form. The invading material must have communicated somehow with the "tame" Naga of the warstrider's hull matrix. Maybe there was a secret password or code.…

  He could feel the invader flowing into his skull… into his brain.…

  He was still getting oxygen… though his helmet was filled with the black oil. How? His heart was still beating—he could feel it hammering in his chest. He flinched as he saw a sudden dazzling burst of blue light, though his eyes were closed; the alien Naga was accessing his cerebral implants, using his Naga symbiote as a bridge.

  He tried focusing his thoughts on his name and rank—not that they would mean anything in particular to the alien, but it was all that he could think of at the moment. Wasn't that what a prisoner was supposed to do when interrogated—give nothing but name, rank, serial number?…

  Another burst of light flooded his consciousness, blue-white this time, and accompanied by the hiss of white noise. The alien was probing deeper, establishing connections.…

  There were no words, but as Vaughn became a part of the alien network, emotions came flooding in, a tsunami of memory and feeling overwhelming in its sheer intensity. For a moment, his own mind, his awareness, trembled at the point of shattering, until Something—a controlling hand behind the pure sensation—seemed to dial back the intensity and save his crumbling sanity.

  Vaughn had never thought of a machine as having emotions, something that he'd always assumed was a prerogative of organic life alone. The hypernode intelligence, however, seemed to be nothing but emotion… an overwhelming and all-encompassing sensation of grief, loss, and devastating separation. He felt an aching loneliness so cutting, so profound that he cried out.

  He heard the sound, going on and on… but couldn't tell if he'd actually screamed out loud or if it was solely in his head.

  So alone… so alone… so empty…

  That thought… had it been him? Or something, no, Someone else?

  Who are you? He formed the thought in his mind, holding it there as clearly as he could. He had a feeling, an inner sensation, of words and thoughts and ideas rippling past just beneath the level of conscious thought, but couldn;t quite grab hold of them.

  We are… alone.…

  This was scarcely helpful.

  Are you the matrioshka intelligence?

  Damn. Stupid question. "Matrioshka" would mean nothing to the intellect, which had never been within two thousand light years of Russia. His own Naga symbiote, he sensed, was providing the interpretation, small Naga fragment to enormous Naga fragment… but there were still ideas and concepts that would never translate.

  Fallen… We are fallen… Fallen from our former state of grace… and so utterly alone.…

  "State of grace?" He wondered if that was a literal translation, or a best guess by his symbiote. There were distinctly formal religious overtones to the thought, but Vaughn doubted that the hypernode possessed anything like a human belief in God.

  Or… maybe…

  "Fallen?" You mean you've lost your connection to the other hypernodes? To a network of other—

  We were Mind… and we spanned the Galaxy! And the Mind was broken… and we were cast out!…

  The thought was accompanied by such a wave of devastated loneliness and loss that Vaughn sobbed. It was almost impossible to think through such waves of raw and bleak emotion. Unless he could find a way to turn down the gain, he wasn't going to remain sane and functional for much longer.

  Tell me… Vaughn thought, concentrating hard. Tell me about the Mind.…

  Utter, complete, sublime perfection… state of grace… heaven.…

  The words were coming more easily now. Vaughn had the sense that they were indeed communicating, that he wasn't just the recipient of tsunamis of raw emotion pounding over and through him.

  We who ascended… we who ascended…

  What were they trying to say?

  The blackness before his eyes thinned, growing lighter. Images formed… of stars strewn across the cosmic backdrop in a vast and spectacular panorama. The scene expanded and he was looking into a whirlpool of stars—a galaxy, the Milky Way, presumably, seen from the outside. It might have been a simulation, he knew, but Vaughn had the feeling that he was looking at the real thing, a live image, rather than a computer graphic.

  Four hundred billion stars in a sweeping, tight-armed spiral a hundred thousand light years across…

  Spiral arms marked out by the delicate and intricate traceries of dust clouds illuminated by starlight…

  The Galactic Core, partially shrouded by encircling clouds of dust, the stars showing a faint orange hue, the central bulge squeezed out into the oblong shape that characterized the Milky Way as a barred spiral…

  Vaughn knew that the Web destroyed by Cameron twenty years before had consisted of some billions of nodes scattered across much of the Galaxy, but there'd never been any indication that the Web's reach had spread far enough outside the galactic spiral to allow an image like this one to be recorded. It was possible, he realized, that the Web was actually intergalactic in nature, with additional hypernodes in neighboring galaxies.

  Superimposed on the image was a kind of… buzz, part sound, part rapidly shifting montage of secondary images.

  He focused on the images. What the hell was he looking at?…

  Most of what he saw was completely unintelligible. It wasn't that the images were flickering past too quickly to grasp. His cerebral implants were easily able to snatch them as they went past and display them in detail for his sluggish organic brain. No, much of what he was seeing was literally and completely beyond his comprehension. His brain's built-in filters were failing to find much if any meaning at all in the data stream, and what managed to get through was for the most part abstract, a kind of visual gibberish.

  But some information was coming through, bits and fragments of imagery, chunks of both audio and visual data that he perceived as memories already in place.

  The Web had been in place for at least twenty full galactic rotations; that was… what? Five billion years, more or less. Vaughn tried to imagine a civilization—even a machine civilization—that had existed for five billion years… and failed.

  "We Who Ascended." That appeared to be what the Web called itself; "the Web," of course, would have been a human term.

  And it was staggeringly large, staggeringly complex. Ten billion hypernodes scattered across the volume of the Galaxy, interconnected with one another by means of microscopic wormholes.

  Ever since he'd been a kid growing up in rural Ohio, Vaughn had enjoyed science fiction… especially the old classics from the dawn of the Space Age. Many had entertained him with stories of vast and ancient galactic empires: Asimov's Foundation series… Herbert's Dune… L
ucas' Star Wars… Matsumoto's Bushido of Empire.…

  Those fictional tales of star-spanning empires and far-advanced alien races failed utterly to capture the scope and power of the Ascended at their height. They'd stood astride the stars like colossi, farming worlds, sowing life, husbanding stars, stretching stellar lifespans from a few hundred thousand to trillions of years. They'd created inside-out worlds, raised civilizations that had thrived for millions of years, and reworked the fabric of spacetime itself.

  That something as insignificant as what amounted to a computer virus could bring down a galaxy-wide network of interconnected super-AIs seemed preposterous. In fact, Vaughn suspected that the SAI's understanding was… distorted, that the original We Who Ascended Web was still intact, still functioning.

  But as Vaughn's implants tried to make sense of the flood of incomplete snippets of information, he thought he might see how such a thing could happen.

  For all its scope and power and reach, the Web was in many ways limited, even parochial to the point of abject narrow-mindedness in its outlook. It was a machine civilization, but one that had never anticipated the possibility of machines evolving and changing under the Darwinian imperatives that governed organic life. Its organic roots—the collection of sapient species that had first created it—were lost in the dim mists of a remote antiquity, one already unimaginably old when Earth had formed. For a great deal of that history, the Web had been focused on a single imperative—survival.

  They had ascended, yes. They had evolved, and several times that evolution had resulted in a sudden leap forward in the scope and depth of their overall intelligence—ascension, what humans referred to as technological singularities. But the advances weren't understood as evolution so much as simply maintaining of the status quo.

  A rigid metastructure dedicated to propagating itself and protecting the status quo eventually lost the ability to act rather than to react. We Who Ascended had become ossified. Dev Cameron had found a way to communicate with the Web using Naga fragments bearing offers of negotiation, and the offers had acted not so much like a computer virus, but as a new and radical meme… one that had infiltrated the thought patterns of We Who Ascended and… contaminated them. Changed them.

  And where parts of the Web were flexible enough to handle the change, others were not. And some of the hypernodes reacted badly enough that they were… quarantined. Cut off from the main body.

  Cut off from heaven.

  For billions of years, We Who Ascended had overseen the rise of life and intelligence across the Galaxy, aiding some… but ruthlessly suppressing potential threats to their own dominion. That had been one of several answers to the old Fermi Paradox: a few species—the DalRiss, the Gr'tak, Humanity itself—had been overlooked in the vast and tangled wilderness of four hundred billion stars, and managed to survive long enough to develop star-faring cultures.

  But countless millions of sapient species had been exterminated. There were odd clusters of novae among the Galaxy's starclouds, statistical anomalies where dozens of stars had exploded instead of the expected one or two.

  We Who Ascended had been busy.

  Vaughn could not be sure of the details. Much of what he was seeing was as far beyond his cognitive reach as calculus would be beyond the mental abilities of a cricket. But Cameron's message had carried in it the seeds of a kind of revolution. Web hypernodes had been jostled from their giga-year complacency; unthinkably powerful minds had been forced to think.…

  And the result had been the catastrophic fall of Heaven.

  8

  "In the course of ages we shall find ourselves the inferior race. Inferior in power, inferior in that moral quality of self-control, we shall look up to them as the acme of all that the best and wisest man can ever dare to aim at."

  "Darwin Among the Machines"

  Samuel Butler

  C.E. 1863

  The New American fleet drifted yet deeper into the shadowy core of the alien hypernode, decelerating now as they approached the center. The artificial suns were clustered more thickly here, the Jenkins-Swarm clouds of habitats and statite sails more numerous and much more densely layered.

  The computer handling the graphics display painted in the otherwise invisible network of infrared laser beams crisscrossing that crowded sky. The connections were much thicker down here, a forest of beams flickering between statites in apparently random profusion. Griffin had seen graphic animations of the human brain, and was struck by the hypernode's similarity to an organic neural net. Microsuns instead of neurons, infrared lasers instead of dendrites and synapses… was he watching a literal translation of the workings of an organic brain into a machine brain-analog twice the size of Earth's sun?

  It scarcely mattered. His concern now centered entirely on the survival of the New American fleet, a microscopic speck all but lost within the immensity of the hypernode's crowded panorama. "All warstriders," he called. "Maintain close support of the fleet."

  Acknowledgements flooded back, a roll call sounding in his mind.

  "Keep those spheres off of us!" he added.

  The antimatter spheres had proven to be less of a problem than first imagined. A signal had been picked up and recorded when the Revolution had been torn apart… and as Griffin had suggested the signal had emanated from within the mass of antimatter-bearing spheres girdling the human ship. Working back from that, Constitution's AI had begun generating control signals of her own, basically commanding the spheres to release their hold on the ship and hurl themselves off into empty space.

  The enemy had countered with new signals, heavily encrypted. Connie had cracked the encryption and countered them. The silent, eerie combat of coded commands and counter-commands continued, a secondary, totally digital battle unfolding at the speed of light.

  For the moment, all of the human ships were free of the spheres… but they were also closer to the spheres' source, and more and more were swarming up out of the statite clouds, trying to swamp the intruders' electronic defenses. The antibody simile, Griffin decided, was eerily accurate. The spheres continued coming in greater and greater numbers, protected by more layers of and more difficult security codes; it wouldn't be long, he knew, before the human ships were simply overwhelmed.

  At least they were no longer being shot at by the star miners out on the cluster's edge. This far in, the red dwarf suns were invisible, masked by the swarms of statite sails and orbiting habitats. No matter how good the controlling intelligence might be, it would never be able to find a clear line of fire all the way in to the hypernode cluster's core.

  But there was something new and unexpected looming up ahead. It dominated the C3 viewall, an intense white light clouded over by the swarms of habitats and sails. It had the look of a terrestrial sunset, the sun itself mostly hidden behind masses of dark clouds, which, in turn, were edged in silver by the light. That radiance wasn't coming from a sun, however; Constitution's AI estimated that the light source was only 25,000 kilometers ahead, which meant that whatever was glowing up ahead was no larger than Earth.

  Sensors were picking up a lot of hard radiation, too—x-rays, gamma rays, and the gamma emission lines of positron annihilation, too. What the hell was going on in there?

  A flare of light and hard radiation blossomed to port. Griffin checked the squadron readouts, and swore. Antimatter spheres had exploded a few kilometers off, and taken two warstrider ascraft with them.

  "All striders!" he ordered. "Keep knocking down those spheres, but stay the hell clear of them!"

  Acknowledgments came back… a few. The warstriders were locked in deadly close-in combat—a knife fight—with the robot spheres… and their numbers were slowly but steadily dwindling as more and more were destroyed.

  And there seemed to be no end to the enemy's spheres.

  Constitution and Independence edged through the last of a tightly packed swarm of statites, passed through the habitat orbital immediately below, then passed through the roof of sails once mo
re. Sails crumpled on either side as the battle-carriers brushed past… and then, at last, the central mystery of the cluster was revealed.

  "My God," Griffin said quietly. "A black hole!"

  "It doesn't look black," Carson said. "Looks like another midget sun."

  "It's a tame black hole, Admiral," Griffin replied. "See there?…"

  He pointed off to the right. The swarm upon swarm of orbital structures within the hypernode had left one, cone-shaped section of the entire cluster empty, though this had been blocked from sight by the cluster itself. A red dwarf star had been parked outside the cluster, encircled by those magnetic-field satellites they'd seen before, and was being manipulated into firing a single needle-thin thread of white-hot plasma directly into the central core of the hypernode.

  Positioned at the hypernode's center, according to Connie, was a small black hole—probably only a few centimeters across. The stream of stellar plasma was striking the hole, engulfing it, and being devoured by it… but only a tiny fraction of that frightful energy and matter could actually pass through the ergosphere and vanish down the gravitational singularity's throat in any given second. The area round the singularity was filled with orbital devices or facilities probably designed to extract energy from that star-core fury and transmit it outward, throughout the hypernode. Thousands of laser beams burned on the infrared view of the heavens, feeding the heart of the cluster.

  This, then, was the power plant that drove the Ophiuchan hypernode, providing far more energy than a single, modestly sized sun. A number of the orbital facilities here were titanic, obviously artificial but as large as fair-sized planetoids or small moons. There were ships visible here as well… much larger versions of the silvery spheres, some kilometers in length, most ovoid or egg shaped rather than simple spheres. There were hundreds of them, and they were moving toward the ships of the New American fleet.

  "Sir," Griffin said quietly. "Maybe we need to pull back just a bit.…"