Warstrider: Symbionts (Warstrider Series, Book Four)

by Ian Douglas

  The sheer strangeness of Alyan biology had fooled the first human researchers for some time. The Riss were all but helpless without their mounts, shriveled creatures, all tentacles and spines, bent beneath the weight of that massive, crescent shape of fat and bone. According to Brenda, they'd started off as arboreal parasites infesting various of the semimobile trees of ancient GhegnuRish. Eventually, perhaps two million years before, they'd learned to parasitize the forerunners of the Dal, huge, fully mobile, herd-grouped life forms that combined features of both plants and animals. The Dal had provided more than sources of food to the parasites. Their mobility had given the Riss a far greater range, while their herd instincts had created a sense of social order among creatures that had existed as strictly one-to-a-tree individualists before. Nor had the relationship proven one-sided. As Riss intelligence improved, they learned to guide their herds to good grazing areas and to protect them from a variety of nasty predators. With time, parasitism became true symbiosis.

  So far as Katya was concerned, the being before her was a single individual, standing over two meters tall, the upper horn of its bony crescent reaching perhaps half a meter above her eyes. She thought of that crescent as the DalRiss's head, though, as she studied it, she realized it could as easily be the Riss-symbiont's main body, rising from the bristle of spines and tentacles that grew from the horny skin of the Dal-symbiont's back. Two appendages extended from either side of the crescent, like eye stalks . . . or like withered arms? Analogies with more familiar creatures simply broke down. Those appendages, she knew, were closer to ears in function, serving to catch returning echoes from the creature's sonar broadcasts with the aural equivalent of binocular vision, and as organs of balance.

  Katya watched the ungainly head angle toward her slightly, then shift up and down, and had the impression that it was staring at her hard. Despite the DalRiss's nonhuman form and the knowledge that she'd deliberately chosen to meet it this way, the fact was that she felt a brief, sharp pang of embarrassment. Katya was from a culture that did not consider casual nudity to be taboo, but there was something about sitting like that beneath the being's inhuman scrutiny that made her feel uncomfortably vulnerable. Suppressing the feeling, she rose from her perch on the rock and stood so that the DalRiss could scan her from head to toe and back again. For a moment, she imagined that she sensed a faint buzzing, something felt more than heard, like a tickling somewhere deep inside her body as it probed her with focused beams of sound generated within those bony horns, but, once again, that was almost certainly her imagination.

  Abruptly, almost as though it had suddenly made up its mind, it started toward her.

  The Dal moved with far more grace than such an ungainly-looking beast should have been able to muster, walking on armtips with delicate, lightly flickering steps that kept its spiny body a full meter off the ground. It stopped a short distance in front of her, and the rider leaned forward as if to inspect her more closely. The concave portion of the vertical crescent was lined with leathery folds of skin that reminded Katya vaguely of a face, though there were no eyes or evident facial features. A swelling at the back of the structure, she knew, was the braincase.

  Katya remained motionless as it studied her, save to slowly move her arms out from her sides to show that her hands were empty. She didn't know enough about DalRiss protocol or society to know what gesture might be interpreted as friendly, and what might offend.

  With surprising flexibility, the Riss-symbiont dipped one tentacle, one more massive than the others, into a kind of iridescently scaled pouch slung from the joint between Dal and Riss. When it emerged again, something black and glistening hung from the partly coiled tip. Like the unfolding of a pocket telescope, the tentacle lengthened toward her.

  Strangeness kept her from recognizing what it was holding at first, but then the shimmering gel moved in the tentacle's hold. A comel! The DalRiss was offering to communicate!

  Excitement made Katya's heart leap, and she almost had to sit down again. Somehow, she kept her composure, though, extending her left arm until her fingertips touched the offered comel. The gel quivered at the contact, then rapidly flowed across her hand and up her arm, its touch like living ice. Tar black thinned to translucent gray as the comel, a living, gene-tailored organism, spread itself to paper thinness from her fingers to her elbow.

  "You are not like the others." The voice, high-pitched, almost feminine, sounded in Katya's mind, just as if she were receiving a radio call through her jacked-in compatch.

  "Thank you," she replied at once, and with considerably more confidence than she felt. "I was hoping you'd notice."

  And the two of them began to talk.

  Chapter 24

  We take for granted that alien life, when we encounter it, will be the product of a different evolutionary structure than our own. Their bodies, their means of manipulating their environment, even the way they perceive that environment through senses other than the five we take for granted, all will be different.

  With different origins, different organs of perception, won't, too, the way they look at the world be different from the way we view it? What new view of the universe might we gain, what new insights into our own nature might arise from a free exchange of mutually alien thoughts and philosophies?

  —Life in the Universe

  Dr. Taylor Chung

  C.E. 2470

  Dev stepped off the ascraft's debarkation ramp and into the steaming, late afternoon heat. Alya A shone low above the bare-topped ridge to the west, a dazzling, shrunken disk with the eye-aching brilliance of the flare from a laser cutting torch. Swiftly, he walked across a narrow stretch of the rooftop landing apron and into the base receiving lock, which waited for him with open door. Moments later, the lock cycled him through, and he was greeted by a small coterie of Confederation military officers.

  Katya was conspicuous by her absence. She was represented, however, by Vic Hagan, her number two, and several of the Ranger platoon leaders.

  "Welcome to ShraRish, Commodore," Hagan said, saluting. "It's good to see you again."

  "Thank you, Vic. Where's—"

  "Ah, the colonel's waiting for you in her office, Commodore. She sends her regrets, but she's unable to receive you formally just now."

  "Kuso! Since when do I require a formal reception?"

  Hagan gestured at the receiving area, where a number of Rangers were at work unloading supplies brought down aboard Dev's ascraft. "It's just that she felt it would be more appropriate for her to see you in a less public area."

  "I don't understand."

  "I think you will when you see her. Would you like to talk to her now, or meet with the members of the science team first?"

  "I think I'd better see Katya." It certainly wouldn't do to have the expeditionary force's two senior people feuding.

  "Very well. If you'd care to come with me, sir?"

  Dev hesitated, then nodded. He was still sensing the distance between himself and people who'd once been close friends, comrades. Worse, he had the feeling that he was the source of that distance. How many times, recently, had he misunderstood something one of his people was trying to tell him? The trouble wasn't with them, but with him.

  And now, there was this argument with Katya.

  During their last ViRcom exchange, he'd tried to catch some trace of sarcasm in her voice, or some hint of anger, but he'd detected only a neutral, slightly chilly formality, and he'd not expected her to give him an official snub upon his arrival. The ViRcom session before that had not been pleasant, a disagreement that had not degenerated into an out-and-out fight only because he'd ended up pulling rank.

  Well, he thought ruefully, he'd been the one to start it by scolding her for what he'd called her "nullheaded, exhibitionist stunt" and telling her that she could have gotten herself killed. She'd bristled, then rather sharply reminded him that she was in command of ground operations, and that she had simply exercised her best judgment in arranging, as quickly as pos
sible, direct communications with the DalRiss Collective.

  The worst of it was, she was right. He'd gone into this project assuming that it might be weeks before they could arrange a meeting with the DalRiss, and that it might prove impossible to convince them that the Confederation was substantively different in their philosophy than the Empire.

  And Katya had managed to do both within a few hours of her victory over the Imperial ground forces, simply by wandering off alone into the woods and stripping herself down. God, what had she been thinking of? There were still so many unknowns, so many complete blanks in the human understanding of this environment, this alien ecology. She could have been horribly burned . . . or killed by some quirk of the local ecosystem that no human yet even knew existed. Send an alien research team to Earth; put them down at some random point on the surface. How long would it take them to discover rattlesnakes or liver flukes, toxic decon dumps or the Uralsk meltdown site, high-speed maglev traffic or tidal surges during a storm in Florida? And Earth was a tame place compared to ShraRish. Most natural predators were extinct, most hazards man-made.

  Come to think of it, the same could be said of ShraRish, since all of the local biology appeared to be more or less artificial. Besides, most native life wouldn't find a human appetizing, any more than a liver fluke would be able to parasitize an Alyan.

  But still, there were so damned many unknowns. . . .

  The farther Dev walked into the facility, the angrier he got. Who did Katya think she was, pulling a stunt like that . . . then grandstanding his arrival on base, sending her number two to meet him. She could be cold as an ammonia glacier when he saw her, but damn it, he was going to tell her what he thought. Let her be as cold or as officiously formal as she liked. He was going to give her one hell of a lecture. . . .

  "She took over Kosaka's office," Hagan said as they walked into an outer work area, where several officers lay in open ViRcom modules, jacked into the base AI or to remotes in the field. He gestured toward an inner office door. "This is it, sir. She knows you're coming. I'll wait out here."

  Dev walked up to the door, which dissolved as he approached.

  "Hello, Dev," Katya said, smiling a bit ruefully as he stepped inside and the door sealed at his back. "No virtual reality to hide behind this time, huh?"

  Dev tried to suppress his shock but didn't entirely succeed. Katya's naturist excursion had exacted a price, one that hadn't been visible during their ViRcom exchanges. Alya A radiated much of its energy in the ultraviolet, and the ShraRish atmosphere, though it did possess a substantial ozone layer, was only three-quarters as thick as Earth's. Even though she'd insisted that she'd been careful to find a well-shaded patch of deep woods for her meeting with the DalRiss, enough ultraviolet had been mixed with the visible sunlight scattering through the forest canopy to give her a savage sunburn.

  She stood there naked. The skin that had been covered by her air mask, PLSS strap, and boots stood out startlingly white against the flaming, blistered scarlet of her burn, a color mottled in various places by the ugly white patches where dead skin was already peeling away.

  "Lovely, huh?" she asked, spreading her arms and looking down at herself. She grinned as she looked up again, meeting his eyes. "Close your mouth, Dev. You'll inhale more floating shreds of charred epidermis than are good for you."

  The lecture he'd been rehearsing was forgotten. "Good God, Katya! Are you all right?"

  She gave a small grimace. "Nanomeds are taking care of it fine," she told him. "It doesn't hurt much at all now."

  "That's sunburn?"

  She nodded. "Exposure to the atmosphere didn't hurt me at all. It was just uncomfortable, mostly because of the heat. But there was enough UV in the light to fry me in, oh, less than an hour."

  "Damn it, Katya. You could have—"

  "First-and second-degree burns over ninety percent of my body, Dev. Believe me, I know. The somatechs told me in no uncertain terms that without the medical nano I would have been dead. As it was, I was in shock, only half conscious, by the time I got my strider back to the base. They had to come in and peel me out of the slot, and I think I left half of my skin on the couch. Anyway, I'll have a complete new skin in another couple of days." She plucked gingerly at a flaking bit of skin on her shoulder. "In the meantime, I'm shedding a lot . . . and it's damned irritating wearing clothes, especially those goking, snug-fitting skinsuits and shipsuits our nanofactories are programmed to turn out."

  "And I was going to chew you out for not meeting me up at the receiving lock. What an idiot! . . ."

  "Huh. I'd look mighty dignified greeting you up there like this."

  "I had no idea. . . ."

  "That," she said primly, "is why we have virtual communications. So you can look at my electronic analogue instead of at me. Well? Are you going to say it?"

  "Say what?"

  " 'I told you so.' "

  He shook his head. "I don't think I'd better."

  "Wise man." She picked up a filmy length of synthsilk draped over a chair and dropped it again. "I had this run off special, for when I absolutely have to go out in public and don't want to scandalize the sexual conservatives, but it's easier just to go around like this when I can. I hope you don't mind."

  "Normally," he said with a half grin, "I'd be delighted, though I have to admit that I don't find overcooked meat all that appetizing. What worries me right now is what kind of precedent you've established. We can't burn ourselves raw every time we want to talk to the DalRiss!"

  "Don't worry, we won't have to," she told him. "They've known all along that we need protection from their environment, just as they can't enter ours without becoming uncomfortably cold and sluggish."

  "Ah. So we can talk to the DalRiss and still wear E-suits, at least?"

  She laughed. "Of course!" She moved her hands, outlining the shape of her breasts and torso without touching the damaged skin. "This was just to get their attention."

  "Well, I never thought it would affect other species," he said, grinning at her, "but it certainly gets mine. But since I'm sure you'd rather I didn't do anything about it, just now, I'll forgo any physical demonstrations."

  She quirked a smile at him. "Good. I really appreciate that, at least until my skin grows back. And even my skin was a small enough price to pay for what we got."

  "And that is? . . ."

  "A fresh look at the DalRiss, things that the Imperials didn't learn in three years of working with them. Dr. Ozaki and the other Imperial scientists are still in shock, I think. And there's other stuff that the Imperials knew but haven't been sharing with the rest of us. Did you know the DalRiss have a government?"

  "I assumed they must have but never heard what it was like."

  "Don't make any assumptions about the DalRiss. Nine times out of ten you'll assume wrong. But they do have a social structure that combines government, what for lack of a better name we're calling religion, and music, of all things. They call it something that translates as the Collective."

  "Communism?"

  "Not quite. Or maybe it's what communism was supposed to be like, before Lenin and Mao and the other early dictators got through with it. There's certainly a sense of everybody working together toward a common good, and a common racial goal, though we haven't quite figured out what that is, yet. The Communists wanted to create the ideal Soviet Man through applied sociology and economics. The DalRiss are moving toward a perfect DalRiss. You've heard the old expression, 'better things through chemistry'?"

  "In history sims."

  "Well, for the Riss, it's better things through biology."

  "Gene tailoring. Nothing new there. Humans have been arguing about the ethics of improving their own species for five hundred years at least."

  "That's a very small part of it. The Collective part refers to all life on the planet. The DalRiss see themselves as the caretakers of that life."

  "Um. Caretakers for who?"

  "That we don't know yet. We're not even sure the
y have anything like a religion. Some of what they say sounds like belief in spirits or souls. If this was a human culture we were studying, I'd say they worshiped some kind of supreme principle or force of life. But they're not human, and we don't know enough yet to tell whether they're talking about mythology, religion, or a genuine understanding of the physical world that extends into what we would call metaphysics. I'll tell you this much, though. DalRiss biological sciences are going to transform what we think of as biology . . . and probably nanotechnology and our overall view of the physical world as well. Some of what they've been telling us about quantum mechanics, and how belief shapes the universe, rather than the other way around . . ."

  Dev shook his head. "Sounds like I have a lot of catching up to do. You've done a great job, Katya. And . . ." He stopped, floundering for the right words.

  "And?"

  "And I've been the nullhead lately, not you. I'm just realizing that I came down here ready to chew your ass, like you were some shiny-socketed, newbie striderjack fresh out of recruit training. If we can build on what you've accomplished already with the DalRiss, get them to help us, then the Rebellion might actually have a chance. And it'll all be due to you."

  Katya flushed at the compliment, her face coloring, her already reddened throat and breasts darkening slightly. "That's nice of you to say that, Dev. But it's been a group effort. You know that as well as I do. Or it was. You've been awfully distant lately."

  Jerkily, he nodded, accepting the blame and the implied criticism. "You're right, of course. I'm beginning to realize that, too. But . . . it's like I don't fit anymore. I want to, but I simply don't."

  "Because of the Xenolink?"

  "I think so. It must be. I don't know what else could have . . . changed me so much. Changed the way I think and feel. I've always had some trouble getting close to people. Now, well, it's as though I have nothing in common with them at all."