Warstrider 04 - Symbionts

by William H. Keith

  “So you finally decided to come back, eh?” she said with a twinkle.

  “The colonel, here,” Sinclair said gravely, “has been threat­ening to use her Rangers as a search party if you didn’t come back to us soon. We’re all relieved that you made it back.” He paused, consulting an inner voice. “Well, we have about twelve hours before Congress is scheduled to reconvene, and I, for one, have to review this new information that the captain has brought us.” He glanced from Dev to Katya and back again. “Will you two be able to attend the staff briefing afterward?”

  “Of course.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good. I’ll see you then. In the meantime, perhaps Katya will be good enough to show you to your quarters and get you settled in.” He grinned at them. “I imagine you have some catching up to do.”

  “Thank you, sir.” With military personnel coming and going on extended missions from the Rogue, quarters were assigned on a short-term and rotational basis, while personal effects were stored in a cargo module near the sky-el’s hub.

  Dev turned to Katya as Sinclair and his entourage walked away. “Hello, stranger.”

  “Hello, Dev. Welcome back. It’s… awfully good to see you.”

  “It’s wonderful to see you.” He glanced around the crowd­ed concourse. “So… it looks like privacy is still at a premium.”

  “It’s worse than ever, Dev. The port and hab facilities down at New Argos are growing fast, but not fast enough to keep up with our growth. We’ve had almost eight thousand more people arrive in the past four months, from all across the Shichiju. The word’s spreading, Dev. The whole Frontier wants independence.”

  “Which leaves us looking for a place to get reacquainted.” He glanced around the concourse. The sky-el hab had origi­nally been designed as a roomy outpost for a staff of, at most, a hundred Imperial observers and Sekkodan scouts. Now, with the facility serving both as government center for the Confederation and as headquarters for the CONMILCOM, the Confederation Military Command, it had a permanent population of over seven hundred and a transient population of perhaps a thousand more. Many people lived aboard the various transports in orbit, but they had to rotate between shipboard assignments and the spin-gravity habs of the sky-el in order to stay fit and healthy. Too long a stretch of zero G made the strongest man a helpless cripple.

  Most of the growing population, of course, lived on the surface. “No time to go down to Herakles, I suppose,” Dev said, a little wistfully.

  “Not with us as short on ascraft transport as we’ve been. We wouldn’t make it back for at least a day or two. I think we’d better settle for a couple of com modules.”

  “Well, lovely lady, you provide the modules,” Dev said, smiling. He tapped the side of his head with his forefinger. “And I’ll provide the place. Lead on!”

  Later, Dev and Katya shared a virtual reality, their bodies unfelt within separate ViRcom modules, their minds linked by software. Waves crashed along a sandy beach; the sun, westering, touched the ocean with gold and sparkling white, as sea gulls wheeled in an afternoon sky. Nearby, white foam chased skittering clusters of sandpipers up and down the sand. Dev wasn’t even sure if the reality behind the scene existed anymore, so polluted had most of Earth’s inshore waters been for at least the past five centuries.

  But it stirred memories of home in him, and for Katya as well. Her New America had no sea gulls, but she remem­bered its oceans with their slow but vast, moon-driven tides, quite well.

  “That’s better,” Dev said, turning to face her. “Alone at last!”

  “Welcome home, fella,” she said. “It’s been awhile.”

  “Way too long.” He reached out, took her in his arms. Their analogues in this simulation wore casual clothing, shorts and pullovers, and they were barefoot in the sand. She felt wonderful inside the circle of his arms. The simulation was exact enough that it even reproduced the smell of her hair, plucking it from his memory. “You don’t know how I’ve been missing you!”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t say that. What makes you think I don’t?”

  They kissed. Long minutes later, Dev pulled back. “Okay. Maybe you do know.” Gently, he pulled her down to the sand with him, then slid one hand up beneath her shirt, caressing bare skin.

  She reached up and caught his hand, pinning it against her breast. “Dev, I’m sorry…”

  “Oh, yeah.” Gently, he pulled his hand out from under her shirt. “Sorry.”

  “Can we wait until we can do it… for real?”

  “Of course.”

  Katya had disliked virtual sex as long as Dev had known her, even though the sensations were indistinguishable from the real thing. Sex, like any other activity and sensation, was perceived in the brain and it mattered not at all whether the stimulation came from the body’s nerve endings or from an interactive data feed from an AI link. Dev never had learned why Katya felt the way she did about recjacking, but he was usually more than happy to go along.

  The only problem was his aching need for her now. It had been four months since he’d seen her last, and the one-sided recreational simulations of Katya he’d taken along during Eagle’s mission no longer seemed as fresh or as real as they once had. No AI, after all, could perfectly duplicate a real person’s speech and mannerisms closely enough to make them seem fresh indefinitely, not with only the linker’s own memo­ries to draw on. Halfway through Eagle’s passage back to Herakles, Dev had decided that it was the unexpected in a relationship that kept a relationship alive.

  Maybe, he thought, that was why two-person recjacking linkages were so much more interesting than solos.

  Since Katya didn’t like virtual sex, though, they were going to have to find times and places to tryst in person, and that was likely to be impossible until they could get down to Argosport together. The “quarters” that Sinclair had mentioned was one of a number of open barracks at the quarter-G level, where as many as twenty men and women might be spending their downtime at any given hour, asleep or using the small, adjoining rec room. In a multiworld metaculture that viewed virtual sex as casually as it did downloading ViRdrama, public physical sex was tolerated, even accepted. Dev, from Earth and thoroughly familiar with the shakai, or Imperial overculture, was used to the idea of sex in public, though he’d never done it himself. Specific cultures within the metaculture, however, especially on the Frontier, required privacy for that most per­sonal of personal experiences. Katya, Dev knew, was more likely to enjoy ViRsex with him than she was to engage in physical sex in one of the hab’s open dorms.

  Well, he told himself, he’d gone four months without the reality of Katya in his arms. He could go a few days more. It was enough just to be able to see her, to talk with her… at least for the moment.

  “So,” Dev said, trying to cover his racing thoughts, “while we were out-system, was there any sign of… of the Naga?”

  “Nothing,” Katya said cheerfully. “Not so much as a single black puddle. It seems to have retired pretty far down into the crust after it linked with you. Some of us have been speculating as to whether or not you scared it off.”

  “Maybe I did. It sure as hell scared me.”

  He shivered, and Katya reached out, putting his head in the crook of her arm and pulling him close against her side. They stared up at the slowly reddening sky.

  “What do you think?” Katya said after a time. “Are they going to go with Farstar?”

  “I guess that’s up to Congress and to CONMILCOM,” Dev replied. “I still think it’s the only logical option for us. And this, this news from Alya A, gives us a chance of making it work.”

  “There are still people on the command staff who think the whole thing is a bad idea. In Congress, too. Sinclair has been fighting them on this idea since we got here.”

  “I can imagine.” Dev shook his head. “I guess what con­tinues nagging at me is, why us?”

  “Well, our experience with the Nagas makes that part of it obvious enough.”

&n
bsp; “Why? We’re supposed to make some sort of alliance with the DalRiss. The Naga don’t have a thing to do with it.”

  “It’s our experience,” Katya said. “With nonhuman logic. With nonhumans, whatever they look like. Anyway, the Naga at GhegnuRish is helping the DalRiss reclaim their homeworld. It’s part of the political picture out there.” Katya was silent for a long moment. “You know, General Sinclair probably wants you at ShraRish because you’re a hero to the DalRiss. If it hadn’t been for you…”

  “What hero… me? Kuso, we don’t know that, Katya. We don’t know enough about how the DalRiss think! Maybe they don’t have heroes.” He snorted. “Hell, maybe they kill and eat their heroes, or sacrifice them to the Great Boojum.”

  “Sorry. Great Boojum?”

  “Sure. The Snark was a Boojum, you see.” When Katya gave him a blank expression, he shrugged. “Sorry. Lewis Carroll. I did a lot of literary downloading while we were in K-T space. Lots of the old classics. Carroll. Hemingway. Spielberg.”

  “Sounds more like Lea Leanne,” Katya said, naming a popular ViRdrama actress known throughout the Shichiju for her performances blending virtual sex, suspense, and danger, and usually involving monsters, both alien and human.

  “Katya, I’m not a hero. Hell, I shouldn’t even be a ship captain. I’m twenty-eight standard years old. Three years ago I was a legger, an enlisted grunt in the army. Now they have me commanding commerce raiders and serving as liaison to the only nonhuman civilization we know.”

  “You’re not counting the Naga?”

  “With only one Naga to a world and no knowledge of their fellows, I don’t see how you can apply the word civilization to them.”

  “That’s true. Well, I know the feeling, Dev. I’m not that much older than you, and they have me jacking a regiment. Fielding’s Laws, I guess.”

  Dr. Karl Gunther Fielding had been a twenty-fifth-century philosopher-scientist who’d programmed a classic study called Man and His Works. He’d been the first to state as a law what had already been obvious for some time: Cephlink technology extends human productivity by reducing the time necessary to achieve expertise. The second law followed from the first. Cephlink technology increases personal stress levels by reduc­ing the time necessary to acquire physical experience.

  In other words, the ability to download memories, knowl­edge, and even certain skills into people with the right implant hardware had transformed human culture in countless ways throughout the past five centuries, but perhaps the most impor­tant was the end of the notion that “adulthood” began at a certain chronological age. A formal, career-oriented education that had required eight or ten years of advanced schooling during the twenty-first century could now be downloaded over a period of months. At the same time, however, confidence, maturity, and seasoning were still products of experience. While there was no objective difference between events experienced physically and events experienced through downloads, the fact remained that someone forty standard years old had still endured, roughly, twice as much life as someone who was twenty standard.

  Within the modern, cephlink-dominated military, rank was not nearly so closely linked to age as it once had been. Dev’s navy rank of captain and Katya’s equivalent army rank of colonel were not unusual for people in their late twenties. His understanding of formal space navy tactics, of leadership techniques, even of political theory was as complete as that of any of his peers… more so, in fact, than some, because he’d had the opportunity to apply his downloaded training in combat.

  The downside, though, was the uncertainty that a given course of action, a given decision, a given order was right. That came with a life experience that Dev was beginning to realize he lacked. Linked to a starship’s AI, or—worse—caught up in the god-glory of a Xenolink, he felt invulnerable, superhuman.

  But now, with no electronic enhancement save the program tricking his brain into accepting the reality of sunset, waves, sand, and the warmth of the girl in his arms, he felt very small indeed.

  “Maybe,” Dev said, “Congress will vote the notion down.”

  Chapter 7

  Few technological advances have so changed the way we learn as cephlinkage. Why describe a place to students when a simple link and data download can transport them there in a fully interactive ViRsimulation?

  Of course, while ViRsims can shape our thinking by providing an ideal forum for the exchange of ideas, they can do nothing about the ways in which we think.

  —Man and His Works

  Dr. Karl Gunther Fielding

  C.E. 2488

  The measure passed, 351 to 148, with 19 abstaining.

  Currently, there were within the orbiting Heraklean sky-el called the Rogue 518 delegates representing various Frontier colonies in the Confederation Congress. The majority were by now dedicated to independence from the Terran Hegemony and the empire of Dai Nihon and had demonstrated that dedi­cation by signing Sinclair’s Declaration of Reason; a minority, about two hundred or so, either remained undecided or still hoped to achieve an eventual reconciliation with Dai Nihon, perhaps within the framework of some sort of commonwealth of worlds. Those delegates who’d opposed any change at all in the Frontier worlds’ colonial status had been left behind on New America when Congress had fled that world ahead of the Imperial invasion force. Whether or not they could still be considered to be delegates of the Confederation Congress, albeit nonvoting ones, was still a matter for frequent debate.

  As currently interpreted, however, the rules for passing major, policy-level measures or legislation required a two-thirds majority of those delegates present, so Operation Farstar had needed 346 yes votes to be approved. Obviously, many of the delegates who did not yet agree on the need for a complete break with the Terran government had voted yes on Farstar. Dev wondered why they’d supported the measure.

  “I’d have thought,” Dev told Sinclair, “that they’d be afraid we’d really screw things up by getting involved in whatever’s going on out at Alya A-VI.”

  They were in the conference room set up as part of CONMILCOM’s Headquarters suite aboard the Rogue. There were no chairs present, but at the sky-el’s half-G level that was little more than a minor annoyance, and it did allow more men and women to crowd in next to the round, central desk with its holographic projector and AI interface pads. The low, gray-surfaced egg shapes of link modules lined the compartment’s bulkheads. Most were empty now, but a few were occupied by duty officers maintaining a communications watch with Argosport and with picket ships scattered across the Mu Herculis system.

  Eighteen CONMILCOM staff officers were gathered in the room for the briefing, not counting Dev, Katya, and Sinclair himself. One civilian was present as well. Her name was Professor Brenda Ortiz, and she was a xenosophontologist, the closest thing to an expert on the DalRiss that the Confederation had. An attractive woman of perhaps forty-five standard years, she wore her dark hair long at the top and braided down her back but had shaved the sides of her head to give free access to the T-sockets behind her ears. Dev felt a sense of kinship with her; like him, she was from Earth.

  “They are afraid of exactly that, Captain,” Sinclair replied. “That we’ll screw things up. But they’re more afraid of doing nothing, which is what will happen if we can’t break this deadlock of personnel, weapons, and supplies. Right now, Congress feels—and for once our intelligence sources tend to support the feeling—that we have five months, possibly six, before the Empire moves against our base here at Herakles. Our fleet is still no match for theirs, so if we first move against the Imperial forces at any of the other colony worlds we’re going to get slapped down, hard. If we stay here and wait, sooner or later we get slapped once and for all.”

  “Damned if we move,” a short, dark-skinned man with silver hair and a major general’s rank tabs on his collar said, “and damned if we stay.”

  “That’s about where we stand, General Chabra.”

  “Well, there’s a problem then, sir,” Dev pointed o
ut. “The Alyan system is one hundred thirty light-years from Sol, so that’s…” He consulted his personal RAM files, performing a quick calculation based on Mu Herculis’s distance from Sol and the angular separation between Alya and Mu Herc in Earth’s skies. “Make it one hundred five lights from here to Alya,” he said a second later, as the figure appeared in his mind. “That’s a three-and-a-half-month trip, minimum. I don’t care how glad the DalRiss are to see us, we’re not going to be able to travel there, kick the Imperials out and get solid DalRissan help, then make the voyage back here before that five- or six-month deadline. It’s impossible.”

  Sinclair nodded. “Actually, we’ve had a thought on that, but it’s such a long shot we can’t realistically count on it. But the one DalRiss starship we’ve seen in action demonstrated instantaneous travel, all the way from Alya A to Altair in literally no time at all. If you succeed in your mission, you may find your trip back to Mu Herculis takes less time than you imagine. In fact, the single most important reason for establishing close ties with these people is the possibility that we can learn how to duplicate that.”

  “Surely that’s what the Japanese have had in mind all along, Travis,” General Darwin Smith said. “They’ve had a presence at Alya A-VI since 2540, now, and they still haven’t found out how the DalRiss manage that trick. How is our expedi­tionary force supposed to do in weeks or days what the best Imperial scientists haven’t been able to accomplish in three years?”

  Sinclair glanced across at the civilian. “Professor? You had some thoughts on that.”

  “Actually,” Brenda Ortiz said, “we think the Imperials may be asking the DalRiss the wrong questions. They want to know how to duplicate DalRiss technology through machines, especially that remarkable space drive of theirs. The idea, of course, is to learn how to build our own version, to install it on our ships, though some of us doubt that it can be done that way. We know the DalRiss use a biologically tailored organism, something they call an Achiever, in order to bend space. The thing might not be possible at all unless we use DalRiss technologies.”