by Ian Douglas
Garwe lashed out with his tentacles, burning down another eight or ten of his attackers. Free for the moment, he increased power to his repulsors and moved his pod higher. “Blue One!” he called. “Fall back! You’ve got a hole burned through your nano!”
As if encouraged by the sniper’s partial success, other electron bolts began snapping out of the jungle. Dozens of the Krysni shriveled and fell, or vanished in white puffs of vapor, victims of friendly fire, but the unarmed mob kept moving forward, ignoring casualties from both sides of the battle, trying to overwhelm the twelve Marine battle pods by sheer weight of numbers.
Garwe’s pod had already located each enemy shooter and plotted them on his targeting matrix, revealing them on his IHD as flashing, bright red reticules. He selected the one that had hit the captain and triggered his pod’s primary weapon, sending a megajoule pulse of X-ray laser energy slashing into the jungle.
Purple and orange vegetation shriveled and died; the Reef’s tentacles curled back from the high-energy caress, and the compound’s support platform shuddered as the vast life form that was Hassetas reacted to the heat.
“Skipper!” Garwe yelled! “Request permission to disengage! If we can just maneuver—”
“Negative!” Xander snapped back. “We do it by the opplan!”
The opplan—the operations plan downloaded from the squadron’s command constellation—required the War Dogs to deploy on the compound platform and provide a kind of barricade for the off-worlders, protecting them from the locals until a transport could make it down from orbit. The Marines would hold the perimeter until the off-worlders could evacuate, then pull out.
Ideally, no shots would have been fired, and the mere presence of the Marine battlepods should have kept the Krysni at bay. Somehow, things hadn’t quite worked out that way, however.
Garwe kept firing into the jungle, targeting Krysni power sources as his pod’s sensor suite picked them up and flagged them on his in-head display. The off-worlder compound was trembling and bucking now as the floatreef moved the massive, main tentacle to which it was anchored.
“Trolischet!” Xander snapped on the general frequency. “I suggest you get your people off of the compound platform!”
“We can’t!” Trolischet replied, her voice shrill. “We have no ship!”
“An evacuation ship is inbound,” Xander told her. “ETA less than ten minutes! But you might not have ten minutes! You need to get everyone into evacuation pods, fliers, flight-capable suits, whatever you have that will carry you. All you need to do is to get off this damned reef before it decides to scratch!”
“There are over two hundred of us, Captain! We couldn’t save more than a quarter!”
“Well, then, save them, damn it! Or you’re all dead!”
Other Marines were targeting the snipers now as well, those that could still move and had not been completely engulfed by the advancing wall of balloon bodies and angry, lashing tentacles. Garwe pivoted, targeting a second source of high-energy electron beams, and then three bolts caught him at once, slamming into his Starwraith in a searing detonation of raw energy.
Warning lights winked on in his IHD, his defensive fields flickering and dimming beneath the overload. A half-second later, three more beams struck and his nanodefenses went down, slabs of active nano burned from the Starwraith’s outer shell, oily smoke boiling from a puncture in the foametal structure beneath.
Garwe cut his repulsors, dropping back into the relative cover of the tentacle-to-tentacle melee below. His pod jostled and bumped in the press of leathery balloon bodies and lashing tentacles as he rerouted the majority of his power flow to the task of repairing his outer-shell nano. He tried discharging a few thousand volts through what was left of his outer nano, but the attempt brought up more warning lights and no other effect.
The Krysni appeared to be learning quickly. Captain Xander’s Starwraith had been hit again repeatedly, and Palin, Mortin, and Javlotel were down as well, large patches of their nanoshells burned and peeled away, exposed portions of their inner armor partly melted under the fierce heat of the enemy fire.
And it was all wrong. The two symbiotic sentient species of Dac IV weren’t technic, and didn’t have manufactured weaponry of any sort. Individual Krysni possessed a biological weapon—a toxin delivered through hollow, pressure-fired barbs like a terrestrial jellyfish—which they used when necessary against some of the mindless predators of Dac IV’s deeper atmosphere layers, but those were useless against a Starwraith, even one as badly damaged as Garwe’s. And without a solid surface from which to mine and forge metals, indeed, without fire, the Krysni and their immense and sapient floating cities had never developed anything remotely like material technology at all.
Where in hell had they gotten electron beam weaponry? Who had taught them how to use it?
At the moment, the press of Krysni balloons around him were doing quite well without advanced technology. His crippled Starwraith was now covered by leathery blue bodies clinging tightly to his armor, their floater sacs deflated, with hundreds more Krysni clinging in layers on top of them. He could see what they were doing by picking up a visual feed from Blue Twelve—Lieutenant Namura’s wraith. It looked as though some hundreds of the creatures were clinging to him, with the outer layers inflating their bodies in an attempt to lift him clear of the deck. More and more Krysni floaters were hooking on, puffing up their bodies to well over a meter in diameter, taut-skinned globes filled with biochemically heated hydrogen.
He fired his X-ray laser, the beam punching through bodies and releasing a roiling cloud of smoke. More Krysni drifted in to replace the ones incinerated by his attack. He fired again…and then a third time, each shot burning away dozens of the things, but then his power reserves plummeted and the laser cut out after the third pulse.
“Blue Flight, this is Blue Seven!” he called out. “My weapons are dead!”
“Same here!” Lieutenant Radevic shouted. “Weapon power leads are burned through!”
“Blue, Blue Two!” Amendes said. “Repulsors out! Weapons down! I’ve gone—”
And then static hissed through the comm feed, as Garwe’s in-head display, with tiny icons for each of the Blue Flight Marines, showed twelve symbols drop to eleven…then ten.
Overwhelming numbers were beginning to tell at last. Garwe found it hard to believe, impossible to believe…but the Dac balloonists were attacking a squadron of modern Marine battle pods and winning. It simply wasn’t possible….
Abruptly, his pod shifted to the right, then inverted…came upright, then inverted again. Slowly, clumsily, they were moving him. He could feel the scrape and roll of tightly packed bodies as they moved. Some hundreds, now, were clinging to the squirming mass of creatures on the inside of the ball, inflating their bodies to levitate the entire, cumbersome mass, while others vented hydrogen like tiny jets in frantic, rapid pulses, shoving him toward the edge of the platform.
Gods! A Starwraith massed almost half a ton under Dac’s gravity. How many of the creatures would it take to negate that weight and actually float him off the platform?
Or perhaps they weren’t actually trying to lift him, but simply to push or drag or roll him off the side. The edge of the tree house deck that was not bordered by the massive bulk of the floatreef tentacles and the surrounding aerial flora was protected by a relatively slender guardrail, and it was less than twenty meters away. If they could get him through the railing, he and some hundreds of clinging Krysni would plummet over the edge and into the black, hot, and crushing depths of the gas giant’s atmospheric deeps. His attackers seemed utterly unconcerned about their own casualties; those crushed up against his optic sensors appeared to be dead already. Evidently, they were willing to sacrifice themselves by the hundreds simply to ensure the destruction of a single Starwraith.
He tried triggering his repulsors, but nothing happened. His primary drive power feed had melted through and shorted out. If he could just take flight, drag this whole,
squirming mass high enough into the thin, cold upper reaches of atmosphere, or pull them with him into the abyss until they lost their grip and fell away…but at the moment he wasn’t channeling enough power to lift a single one of these wrinkled, squirming little creatures, much less all of them and his battle pod.
“This is Blue Seven,” Garwe reported, his mental voice calm. “My drive systems are out. I think they’re trying to drag me to the edge of the platform and drop me off!”
More data flickered through his in-head display, more systems failing. There was a chemical agent in use—a concentrated fluoroantimonic acid. Apparently, the creatures crowded in against his Starwraith were injecting, not biological toxins, but acid. Where the acid could reach exposed fiber optic cables and electronic circuitry, it was causing massive internal damage.
He wondered how the creatures were carrying and injecting the stuff without having their own tissues begin to break down.
The Krysni continued to close in. Xander, Palin, Mortin, Wahrst, and Javlotel as well as Garwe all were enveloped, smothered in roughly spherical masses of writhing bodies. Amendes, Cocero, and Ewis all were out of action, their pods now totally inert, no longer transmitting status or comm feed signals. Bakewin, Radevic, and Namura continued to fight, burning away at the ponderous globes of creatures enveloping their fellow Marines as more and more and still more of the meter-long floaters descended from the sky or emerged from the surrounding jungle, filling the open space above the tree house platform with drifting, jostling, jetting Krysni.
Once, years before in a combat medical training feed, Garwe had seen a simulation based on an actual optic feed from a nanotech camera adrift within a human circulatory system. The sim had been about the human body’s internal defenses, its immune system and the response of antibodies to foreign invaders in the system…in this case a single, rod-shaped bacterium. The bacterium, smaller than a blood cell, was still enormous compared to the antibodies flocking to the injured region, swarming in through the pale yellow haze of the surrounding interstitial fluid in clouds, enveloping the bacterium, smothering it, adhering to it, hurling themselves against it in layer upon layer in an awesome spectacle eerily like what Garwe was seeing here and now. The individual antibodies, he recalled, looked like wrinkled, spiky, pale-translucent and roughly spherical bodies, with twisted strands of long-chain molecules extending like tentacles from their bodies. Their resemblance to the drifting Krysni was unsettling.
Antibodies, defending their host.
Then his optical feed cut out, suddenly, as Namura’s pod came under savage attack from four separate electron beam sources. All he could see now were the bodies of Krysni pressed in against his external pick-ups, glowing slightly at infrared wavelengths.
How long, he wondered, could the tough inner shell of his pod last against this concerted assault? His Starwraith’s on-board AI continued to report on the steadily deteriorating situation as circuit after circuit foamed into inert uselessness at the touch of that concentrated acid, as power reserves drained away, as the last of the active nano coating the machine lost power or programming or coherence and flaked away, dead. His pod was all but inert, now, though the sensors continued to feed him a trickle of optical and kinesthetic data.
He was falling. His battle pod’s kinesthetic feeds fed sensations directly to his inner ear, and he could feel himself dropping within the savage grasp of Dac’s gravitational field, better than two and a half times a standard Earth gravity. After the first few seconds, he wasn’t quite in free fall, he noted. The external atmospheric pressure and temperature were rising swiftly as he fell, and the battle pod and its ungainly cocoon of Krysni defenders rapidly hit a terminal velocity of perhaps twelve hundred kilometers per hour.
He could feel the shudders and jolts as the enveloping shell of dead and dying Krasni ripped away a few at a time.
Swathed in darkness, he plummeted into the abyss….
4
2101.2229
Associative Marine Holding Facility 4
Eris Orbital, Outer Sol System
1907 hours, GMT
“The Xul,” Garroway said, startled, “are acting in a coherent manner? You mean, all of them together, all across the Galaxy?”
“We can’t be sure that all of the surviving nodes are involved,” Schilling told him. “And the nodes we’ve already isolated with AI virsim teams didn’t get the incoming messages, of course. But our node monitors have picked up what appear to be coordinating messages through quantum nonlocal channels. And incidents that we believe are Xul-instigated, somehow, have been occurring throughout the Associative volume.”
“Galaxywide?”
“The Associative has connections through about half of the Galaxy, General. Maybe a bit less. A third?”
“That’s still a hell of a lot.”
“At least a hundred billion stars. A quarter or so have planetary systems. And the incidents are very widely scattered.”
“Okay. The question remains, though, Captain. Just what is it that you expect me and my people to do? My Marines have experience killing Xul, not containing them, not integrating with them, not…not kissing up to them. It sounds to me like it’s not the idea of war that’s out of date. It’s us. The Marines.”
“And that’s why we need the Marines, General. Your generation of Marines. We haven’t engaged the Xul in a stand-up fight for centuries. You and your people have the experience. We don’t.”
“Well,” Garroway said, surprised. “That’s a first.”
“What is, sir?”
He chuckled and shook his head. “Throughout the history of our species, Captain, we humans have always been prepared to fight the last war, not the next one. We go in with tactics, attitudes, and training that are completely out of step with the new threat, whatever it is.”
“Sir? I don’t understand.”
“The history of military history, Captain. We get brand-new rifled weapons capable of killing men at a range of two or three hundred meters, and we still form tightly packed and ordered ranks and march in with the bayonet. We get machine guns, we still try massed assaults into no-man’s land, or even on horseback. We develop large-scale suborbital deployment, and we still pretend that war has front lines. You’re saying we need the old way of doing things, now?”
“In a way, yes, sir,” Schilling said. “When we started exploring out among the stars, we continued to think in terms of the nation-states and countries we’d known on Earth. When we met alien cultures, we tried to put them into the nice, neat boxes with which we’d been familiar on our homeworld. Empires and federations, unions and republics and commonwealths.”
“And associatives?”
“The Associative is an attempt to think in bigger, less exclusive terms,” she told him. “No empires. No borders. No ‘us’ and ‘them,’ just an all-embracing us. And no need to compete for scarce resources in a Galaxy where resources like planets and energy are all but boundless.”
“No borders. What does that mean?…”
Schilling gestured. A star turned bright on the projection of the Galaxy, then expanded swiftly into an open window looking down on an achingly beautiful, sapphire-blue and white world. It was, Garroway realized, the same view of Eris he’d seen upon emerging from cybe-hibe. “There are some hundreds of thousands of species in the Associative,” she told him, “and millions throughout the Galaxy. Relatively few of them, though, have the same requirements when it comes to habitable worlds.” Another window opened within the window, and Garroway stared into six vast, black eyes set above and below a squirming halo of tentacles. The overall impression was of something like a giant squid, but it was difficult to pull all the parts together into a coherent whole, into something that made sense to his brain.
Even so, he recognized the species, for Humankind had met them in 2877, three decades before he’d been born. “The Eulers?” he asked.
“The Eulers,” Schilling agreed. “They prefer worlds like Earth…but at ex
treme depths, a thousand meters or more down in the deep benthic abyss. They genegineered a symbiotic species that could survive on land, to develop fire and industry and space travel. They helped us win the Battle of Starwall, and since then they’ve been among our closest allies. Incredible natural mathematicians. They’ve colonized perhaps two hundred worlds scattered throughout Associative space. Their latest project is this one…Eris, a newly terraformed world right here in Earth’s Solar System. Or, here’s an even better example…” She gestured again, and the images of Eris and the deep-sea Euler vanished, replaced by a world completely sheathed in dazzlingly white clouds…with just a hint of a dirty yellow cast to them. A second window opened within, showing…something. At first, Garroway thought he was looking at a crust of black, hardened lava, with streaks and veins of molten rock just visible beneath, glowing dull red. After a moment, he realized the black mass had a shape, albeit an irregular one, and things like flexible branches weaving in a searingly hot breeze.
If it was a sapient species, Garroway had never seen or heard of anything like it. He wasn’t even immediately sure that it was alive. The image shimmered and bent, as if viewed at a great depth, or within the fiery hell of a blast furnace. The background was a sulfurous red and yellow haze, obscuring vaguely glimpsed shapes that might have been spires of native rocks, or buildings.
“We call them Vulcans,” Schilling explained. “We don’t know what they call themselves. Their cultural conventions, their view of self, their worldview, all are quite different from ours. But they live within volcanic fissures on worlds like Venus. Surface temperature hot enough to melt lead, and an atmospheric pressure similar to what the Eulers enjoy. We were actually looking at the feasibility of terraforming Venus—a colossal project—but a couple of hundred years ago the Vulcans petitioned us to let them colonize instead. They live there now and like it, at pressures equivalent to the ocean deeps.”