Warstrider: Symbionts (Warstrider Series, Book Four)

by Ian Douglas

  Still, a passageway leading aft from the cargo bay's dorsal entryway had been left clear for the loading robots and cargo handlers to come and go, and there was space enough there for the two of them to shed their uniforms and stress and all save that which made them human for a few precious hours. Now, the air around them was aglitter with a few tiny, stray, drifting spheres of perspiration, and it was musky with the mingled odors of their lovemaking. Dev had one hand out grasping a handrail on the bulkhead, bracing the two of them to keep them from bumping randomly into a wall of stacked stores containers.

  "That," he said with a deep and long-anticipated contentment, "was wonderful."

  "Better than sex-in-a-can?"

  "Than what?"

  She snuggled closer. "Than mental masturbation in a couple of comm modules."

  "Much." It was a small lie. Dev still couldn't tell the difference between real and virtual sex, and sex with a person's analogue didn't leave you so obviously in need of a shower. But as Katya clung to his sweat-slick body, he thought that he might now have at least a small understanding of what it was she sought.

  Mostly, he wanted Katya to be happy. He loved her, and he wanted to understand.

  "How are you feeling, Dev?" Katya asked him after a long period of comfortable, drifting silence.

  "Silly question. . . ."

  "About what happened with you and the Naga, I mean. I've been wanting to ask, and others are wondering too."

  How did he feel? For a time, while floating in Katya's warm embrace, he'd all but forgotten the sense of otherness that still lay coiled somewhere within the deeps of his own mind.

  "Others? You mean Sinclair?"

  "And some of the staff people here. Farstar is awfully important to the Confederation—"

  "And they wouldn't want a schiz-out or a burn-brain to be dictating policy with the DalRiss. I can understand that." He sighed, then pushed back slightly away from Katya's body. They were joined together at the hips by a tsunagi nawa, a lightweight, elastic tether that allowed them to move together in microgravity without becoming uncoupled. He touched the connector and the harness unsnapped. They drifted apart, and Dev reached for his bodysuit, hanging in the air close by the bulkhead.

  "Dev? . . ."

  "We really ought to get back. I've got so much admingarbage downloaded onto my sched it's going to take me a year just to—"

  "Dev, talk to me." She bumped up against his back, her long legs circling his hips from behind. The movement sent both of them drifting, and Dev had to let go of his clothing to keep from hitting the bulkhead.

  "Katya—"

  "The last time we talked about it you were still half in shock. Sinclair's giving you command of this squadron. I'd kind of like to know if we've got a psychotechnic problem in our senior staff."

  "I've run the diagnostics on myself," he said quietly, disentangling himself and turning in the air to face her. "Several times. Believe me, I wanted to know too."

  "And?"

  "I'll download them to you if you want. There's been no change. Same TM rating . . . high, higher than the Hegemony Navy would accept, but okay for the likes of us."

  "Point four?"

  He nodded.

  "And no TP or TD?"

  "Insignificant. Believe me, I'm not afraid of AIs and they don't depress me."

  "Dev, there's something wrong. I can feel it in you."

  "Nonsense—"

  "Kuso, don't lie to me!"

  He frowned. "Katya, I'm not lying. Okay, I wonder about myself sometimes. About my own stability. But the monitor programs check out. I . . . it's hard to put into words. Best I can do is say that there's a, a craving for what I felt when I was Xenolinked. A need for more." He swallowed. "You know, coming in-system, before we dropped into fourspace, I was afraid I was going to have to meet you and Sinclair down in Argosport. I was worried about that, afraid of having to get that close to . . . to . . ."

  "To the Naga?"

  He nodded. "When I volunteered to take Eagle out raiding, I thought that enough time would pass that I could forget what it was like, linked into the Naga. But I haven't. If anything, the memories have been getting worse. Stronger. And there are dreams . . ." He saw the alarmed look in her eyes and smiled. "No, I'm okay. I can handle it. It's not like I'm a PCS addict or anything like that."

  When Katya didn't immediately reply, he went on.

  "I do feel . . . changed, Katya. I'm not sure how. It's like, well, it's as though my perceptions of myself were completely rewired while I was Xenolinked. Even now, I can examine my memories of those few moments, and it's like reading about a stranger. I don't recognize myself in what I see." He took a long breath. "If an ant could become a man . . . would it later be able to accept becoming an ant again?"

  "Is that the way you feel? A man's mind, trapped in an ant's body?"

  "I feel trapped. I'm not sure I can put it into clearer words than that."

  "Ever since you were Xenolinked, you've seemed, I don't know. Distant. Isolated, somehow. You were that way right after you broke your link with the Xeno. I was hoping four months would have fixed it, but I, I sense it, that isolation, still in you now." She hugged him closer. "I want to help, Dev."

  He clung to her for a long time. He was remembering. . . .

  "Katya, can you imagine what it was like, being some kind of super genius, having a sensory network that stretched across half a planet, knowing things, thinking things, that even now I can just dimly recall? It's like having had the most wonderful and lavish meal imaginable . . . then not being able to remember the individual dishes or the people present or the reason for the banquet in the first place, but still being able to savor the memory of the food's smell . . . just the smell. I find myself wanting that, that sense of connectedness, of belonging again. Without it, I feel very . . . lonely."

  Katya moved closer, took him again in her arms. "Oh, Dev. It must be awful."

  "It isn't, really," he said. "It's not like some pain that won't go away, or anything like that. It's just a very deep sense of, of sadness, I suppose. A sadness that I don't have what I once had. And believe me, despite that, I don't want to go through a Xenolink again. I think that's what has me confused the most. I've lost something, something that I miss very much and that I'd love to have again . . . but I'm terrified that I might find it. That's why I didn't want to go back to the surface of Herakles. I was afraid that I might find it again, and that the temptation there would be too strong."

  "You know, Dev, there's a Naga out at Alya."

  "Yes. On, or rather, in GhegnuRish. But we're going to ShraRish, the colony world, and the Naga there is dead. We'll be five light-days away from the other one."

  "That's not so very far."

  "It's a hell of a lot farther than we are from the Heraklean Naga right now," Dev said. "Believe me, Katya. I'll be fine. I just need some time . . . and maybe some human companionship. Some closeness."

  She dimpled. "You had plenty of companionship aboard Eagle these past four months. From what I hear, Lisa Canady is quite skilled in such things, and I doubt that she minds sex-in-a-can."

  "Kuso. You know what I mean." He reached out and pulled her close. Again, her legs entwined about him and they kissed.

  Dev tried hard not to think about the fact that this would be their last time alone together for quite a while. During the long voyage to Alya, Katya would be with her troops aboard one of the transports, while he remained on the Eagle. He would see her again when they reached Alya, but time alone together then would be desperately hard to find.

  This time they made love without the tether. It took skill and concentration not to slide apart, and their movements were, of necessity, restrained. If anything, the limits set on their motions by zero-G drove their mutual sensations to an even higher pitch than before. Afterward, adrift together in the warm, narrow volume of the compartment, they slept.

  The being that had once been Dev Cameron reared higher on its mountain ledge, scanning sk
y and horizon with a complex amalgam of senses—human sight and hearing, combined with eighteen external Naga senses ranging from the perception of magnetic fields to the rippling feel of flowing electrons to the dimly sensed mass of bulky objects bending space. . . .

  It was the dream again. After the first few terrifying moments, Dev knew he was dreaming, though despite the lucidity imparted by his cephlink control he could not will himself awake. Part of him did not want to wake. The sensation of surging, triumphant power was overwhelming; at the same time, he could sense the Naga supracell embedded within his body, distributing itself throughout his nervous system in a fuzzy cloud of alien nanotechnics and molecule-slender threads, a blending, a union so complete it would have been difficult for any outside observer to tell where Dev's body had stopped and that of the Naga had begun.

  Externally, he wore the shimmering black-silver serpent-form of a Naga traveler, rearing high atop the man-made mountain of the pyramidal atmosphere generator on the plains north of New Argos; his mind, while it included all that Dev Cameron once had been, was now far more than human, with a scope and a depth and an unhumanly cold precision that felt more machinelike than anything alive. Effortlessly, he traced the threadlike lines of radio communications webbing the battlefield spread out below him like a cluttered playroom floor, penetrated the artificial intelligences of the Imperial warstriders moving across that floor, reprogramming them, ordering them to shut down.

  And in synchronous orbit thirty-two-thousand kilometers overhead, the Imperial fleet hovered like carrion crows. His mind reached . . . stretched . . . focused . . . and found linkage with an Imperial cruiser. Another reprogramming, and the magnetic fields containing the furiously orbiting pair of power-generating microsingularities within the quantum power tap of the cruiser Mogami shut down.

  One of the microscopic black holes evaporated in a flood of radiation; the other, loosed like a pebble from a slingshot, tunneled through the ship's length, devouring everything in its path in a frenzy of gravitational feeding. To Dev, it was as though he'd reached out a hand and squeezed . . . feeling the bulk of Mogami crumpling within his grasp. . . .

  The Imperial ships shut down their radio communications circuits, cutting his link with them like the snapping of a thread. Around him, meanwhile, the bulk of the Naga was spilling from the mountain, its tar-black surface alive with newly shaped eyeballs . . . a trick learned, he knew, from its first encounter with a human—him.

  The thrill of vision was as heady as the sense of uncoiling, unstoppable power. Thrilling, too, was the thundering gallop of thought. Creativity and intuition both were a function of the interconnectivity between the two hemispheres of the human cerebrum, the left and right halves of the brain. Part of the change in himself, Dev could sense, lay in the myriad nanotechnic connections still growing through the corpus callosum that bound the two together. He was thinking faster, and more clearly, despite the bewildering flood of alien thoughts and perceptions.

  * I/we see . . .

  ** You/we can generate powerful magnetic fields.

  * Yes. For movement, for . . .

  ** . . . navigation, for . . .

  * . . .for launching the Will-be-Selves into . . .

  ** . . . the Void, yes. That is what we will do.

  * The Will-be-Selves are not . . .

  ** . . . ready, of course. I have other missiles.

  * What?

  ** These. . . .

  * Rock . . .

  With a shriek of tortured steel, a chunk of iron and ferrocrete, part of the outer shell of the artificial mountain on which he stood, shuddered, then wrenched free from the framework beneath as the human/Naga symbiont generated a magnetic flux. Lightning flared, as storm winds swirled about Dev's being. Clouds blackened the sky, but Dev could still sense the Imperial ships, fleeing now on searing cones of fusion fire.

  With a thought, the chunk of iron and rock flickered into the sky, accelerated in a blink to ten percent of the speed of light. In space, the cruiser Zintu vanished in a flare momentarily brighter than the sun, and over a thousand men died. . . .

  He did it again . . . and again . . . and yet again. Ship after ship flared and died.

  * Is this what you/we call war?

  The godlike feeling of power vanished, wiped away by that single thought. In an instant, Dev—the human part of Dev—became aware of those motes of light in the sky as frail shells enclosing thousands of human beings, and he had been hunting them down, swatting them with a ruthless and appallingly precisionist efficiency.

  My God, what am I doing? What have I become?

  "Dev! . . ."

  ** No. This is not war.

  "Dev, please! . . ."

  ** It's slaughter. Useless slaughter.

  "Dev, wake up! You're hurting me!"

  His eyes snapped open. Katya's eyes stared back into his from centimeters away, wide and terrified, her wide-mouthed scream dwindling to a gurgle as Dev's fingers tightened about her throat, his thumbs pressing home beneath the soft-skinned angle of her jaw. He gasped and released her, and the sudden motion sent the two of them drifting apart. The back of his head impacted sharply on a store's canister, a ringing crack that blurred his vision.

  "Oh, kuso! Katya. . . ." Reaching out, he snagged a handhold, arresting his motion.

  She braced herself against the canisters at her back with one hand and massaged her throat with the other. "I guess you were dreaming. . . ."

  "Kat, I'm so sorry. I . . . I . . ."

  "S'okay." She moved her head back and forth experimentally, then managed a smile. "I'm okay, Dev, really. I was just . . . scared. I was afraid if I hit you or anything, you might just fight harder. So I went limp and screamed to wake you up."

  "That . . . that was good thinking. Katya, I didn't want to hurt you. . . ." He was trembling now, partly from the fast-evaporating emotions of the nightmare, partly with the terror of what he'd almost done. "God, Kat, I could have killed you! . . ."

  "It was just a dream. Really, Dev, it's okay. You told me you'd been having bad dreams. Was it the Xenolink again?"

  Jerkily, he nodded. "I've been consulting a monitor, but—"

  "Dev, after what you went through, I'm astonished your head's still in one piece. It's going to take you some time, that's all."

  "I've had four months. I'm terrified that I'm, I'm changed, somehow. That my mind has changed."

  "You're still Dev, the Dev I know. Believe me. It'll just take a little more time."

  But it seemed to him that she looked away after that, as though unwilling to meet his gaze. Hastily, she reached out and snagged her uniform slacks out of the air nearby and let them mold themselves to her legs.

  For Dev, the nightmare had left him numb with shock. God, what was wrong with him? The encounter with the Heraklean Naga had transformed him into something inhuman. He'd thought, hoped that when the Naga had withdrawn from his body, it had left him as it had found him. No matter how he tried to deny it, though, the experience had altered him in ways that he still couldn't wholly define or measure.

  Suppressing a shudder, he reached for his own clothing and began to dress.

  Chapter 10

  The genius of the ideal subordinate officer in war lies in his ability to receive orders from his superiors and execute them according to his own interpretation of the actual situation and his understanding of his superior's intent and purpose—in short, to read his mind.

  The genius of the ideal superior officer lies in his ability to choose those subordinates who read his mind most clearly.

  —Kokorodo: Discipline of Warriors

  Ieyasu Sutsumi

  C.E. 2529

  Hours later, Dev was jacked into Eagle's psych monitor program when Commander Lisa Canady's voice reached him through the ship's ICS. "Sir? General Sinclair is coming aboard."

  "Eh? Why wasn't I told he was coming? I should have met him at the lock!"

  "Sorry, sir, but no one knew. His ascraft was listed as a sche
duled cargo run from Rogue to Eagle, all very mysterious and secret. I had no idea."

  "Never mind, Lisa. I'm coming." He began downloading the commands to terminate his link with the ship's AI. "Have him escorted to the main lounge."

  In preparation for their departure, Eagle's spin-grav habs had been deployed and set rotating. Most of the living areas—crew quarters, recreation decks, crew's and officers' mess—were located in these pods that had unfolded from Eagle's central core and were now turning with speed enough to create a half G of out-is-down simulated gravity on their outer decks. The main lounge was actually part of Eagle's recreation suite, a place for crew and officers to mingle, with plenty of AI interface screens for access to the ship's library and comm modules lining the bulkheads for those who needed a complete linkage.

  Dev was delayed by a junior ship's staff officer who needed a list of consumables checked and palmed for. Dev used the implant in his left hand to download the data, checked it against a master list stored in his RAM, then fed his electronic approval to the lieutenant's compad. By the time he reached the ship's lounge, Sinclair had already arrived. There was an unusual touch in evidence, however—four Confederation soldiers in full armor and carrying PCR-28 high-velocity rifles at port arms standing guard in the passageway outside. The entryway dissolved and the guards ushered him through.

  It was not roomy inside; large as a destroyer was, there were few places aboard the ship accessible by humans that were, especially now that she was fully loaded with provisions for the long voyage to Alya. Still, the compartment had comfortable couches and a large viewall set to show a nonrotating scene gazing aft from Eagle at the now-full gold, white, and violet disk of Herakles. The deck was carpeted, and soundproofing panels on bulkheads and overhead muffled the steady throb and murmur of noise from the rest of the ship.