"I just need to check on Fred," she said. "Then I'll be making arrangements to move him."
"Very good. I'd hate to think of the Impies getting hold of him." The nano of the door blurred to transparency, then dispersed. "Go on through."
Inside an otherwise empty storeroom, an egg-shaped travel pod rested in a cradle, illuminated by overhead fluorescents. Approaching the pod, Katya reached out with her left hand, palming a small touchplate in the slick, nangineered metal. With a thought, relayed through her cephlink and the circuitry in her hand, she transmitted a code to the simpleminded electronics of the egg. Part of that golden surface rippled like water, then dilated open.
Black motion glistened within, catching the overhead lights with shimmering, prismatic glistenings, like rainbows on a puddle of oil. With a mingling of awe and fear, Katya stared into the writhing substance of what had been, until very recently, Mankind's deadly and implacable enemy.
Xenophobes.
"Not Xenophobes," Katya reminded herself aloud. Xenophobe, of course, was a human name for an entity that had no label for itself other than a concept that seemed to translate as "Self." Now that peaceful communications had finally been established with at least two of the strange, corporate beings, a new name had been coined for them to avoid the biases of fear and bloodstained mistrust that still clung to the old.
"Naga," the name of a race of wise, benevolent, and nonviolent serpent deities in Hindu mythology, seemed apt. Xenophobe war machines were huge, serpentine bioconstructs, classified by type and named after poisonous Terran reptiles. Hostile colonies were still called Xenos, but with this Naga's help, perhaps the Confederation would be able to win more of the vast, dark beings into an alliance unlike any before known to Man.
It would be a while before she could easily think of these things as anything other than "Xenophobes," however. Mastering an unsteady queasiness at the sight, Katya leaned against the cool, nangineered slickness of the travel pod next to the opening and peered inside.
The… creature? creatures?… within moved with a liquid, slithering sound. The travel pod contained only a tiny fragment of the Eridu Naga, about one ton of the original creature's mass, budded from the parent and brought here to New America, months ago. Because the bud contained patterns of data stored by the parent, Confederation xenobiologists had suggested that it might be possible to use this fragment to communicate with other, still-hostile Xenophobes.
It was an exciting idea, one with great promise.
Assuming "Fred," as his human attendants called him, didn't fall into Imperial hands in the meantime.
Despite his nickname, Katya still couldn't look at the entity without a twinge of revulsion. Each individual unit, or cell looked like nothing so much as a lump of tar or grease adrift in a black and viscous liquid, slug-shaped, the size of a man's head and massing perhaps a kilogram or so. Filaments twisted within the liquid, joining each cell to its neighbors in an alien analogue of human neurons and dendrites. Individually, the Xeno units were no more intelligent than the electronics in Katya's cephlink, responding to outside stimuli with all the insight and rationality of a flatworm. Together, however, they formed a colony creature with an intelligence that was almost certainly far greater than human.
Any uncertainty in that classification was due not to doubt about the being's intelligence, but to its sheer difference. Xenos didn't think like humans. With group-memories spanning millennia, possessing a bewildering array of alien senses but lacking both sight and hearing, and with a worldview of the universe literally inside-out from the human perspective, Xenophobes' awareness of their surroundings simply could not be defined in human terms.
Without even a common means of perceiving the universe around them, it was small wonder humans and Xenos had blundered into a war that had lasted some forty-four years now. They'd been found on several planets colonized by man, subterranean organisms, thermovores drinking the heat of a world's core, dwelling in caverns and passageways eaten out of solid rock. Over the course of hundreds of centuries, they multiplied in those caverns, spreading out, seeping through the joints and crevices between strata, reproducing until each colony was a single titanic organism massing as much as a small moon, a vast network threaded through much of the planet's crust.
If the things had just remained underground there would have been no conflict with humans, but eventually pieces of these planetary organisms had risen from their chthonic bastions, drawn by the vast concentrations of pure metals and artificial materials that made up human cities. Several colony worlds - An-Nur II, Lung Chi, Herakles - had eventually been evacuated, abandoned to the Xeno scourge.
For four decades, humans had been fighting back, with cephlink-piloted warstriders, with orbital laser banks and HEMILCOM battle stations, and eventually with nuclear depth charges sent burrowing into the Xenophobes' sub-surface lairs along channels of magnetically deformed rock. On a few infested worlds, on Loki and on alien, far-distant Alya A-VI, the Xenophobes had been obliterated, and the cities were being rebuilt.
Only now, after contact with the alien DalRiss of Alya A and B, was it possible to communicate with the things.
A DalRiss cornel was waiting for her in a cylinder mounted beside the travel pod. Rolling up her left sleeve, Katya thumbed the cylinder open. Wet, glistening gelatin was revealed within, and she carefully pushed her hand and bare forearm into the amorphous mass. Sensing her body warmth, the cornel molded itself to her skin. Its touch was cold and surprisingly dry. Like the Naga, the cornel was a thermovore, feeding on Katya's body heat.
The Xenos, with their direct cell-to-cell networking, possessed nothing like a human language, and communication had been possible only through an intermediate agency, the sheath of translucent, alien tissue now covering Katya's left hand and forearm like a rubber glove.
She flexed her fingers within the creature's velvet embrace. The cornel was a living construct grown and programmed through the biological wizardry of yet another nonhuman intelligence, the DalRiss of distant Alya. Exactly how they managed that still seemed little short of magic, so far as human biologists could determine, but the DalRiss had been in constant contact - and warfare - with the Xenophobes infesting their two worlds for tens of thousands of years. Evidently, they'd learned a great deal about the enemy which they were as yet unable to communicate to humans.
"Okay, Fred," she said. "Talk to me, fella."
Slowly, Katya reached her comel-sheathed hand into the sphere, plunging through the layer of translucent jelly and touching one of the pulsing black masses within…
Wonder… and dazzling excitement. Only recently sundered from the dark warmth and comfort of the vaster Self,»self«was not yet fully adjusted to the sharply narrowed vistas of memory and thought, or to the intense loneliness that isolated it now. Despite its loneliness,»self«trembled in the keen joy of revelation…
Reeling, Katya pulled back, her cornel hand pulling free of the Naga's embrace with a sucking sound. It took a moment for the spartan gray of the storeroom to reassert itself on her senses. The intense cascade of emotion and strangely twisted imagery from the Naga had been overpowering.
She'd come here frequently throughout the past months, trying to better understand Fred, trying to better understand the enigmatic Naga view of the universe. Katya had already learned that Nagas could not get bored… a good thing, she'd decided, for a being that, if her understanding of the visions transmitted through the cornel was accurate, was essentially immortal. A Naga's sense of time appeared to be measured not by artificial demarcations like seconds but by the passage of events.
That's another way they're inside-out from us, she thought. For us, subjective time passes slowly when nothing's going on, fast when everything's happening at once. So far as Fred here is concerned, it's only been a few moments since I talked to him last, and that was weeks ago.
Figuring that one out had been more hunch than brain work, a flash of inspiration that Sinclair had wryly called woman's in
tuition. Now, if she could just figure out what Fred thought about the prospect of meeting a Naga that was not its original Self…
Each Naga, evidently, had considerable difficulty understanding the concept of other intelligences… even of other Nagas. A planetary Naga was a literally Self-absorbed creature, its awareness limited to what was Self and what was not. Scouts - fragments such as Fred - yearned for reabsorption into the greater Self, to be Self instead of the sharply delimited and shrunken»self«, but even that experience couldn't wholly prepare a Naga World Mind for the shock of meeting another being like itself.
The Nagas, it was now known, once they'd converted much of the crust of a planet to their own purposes, entered a reproductive phase, hurling spore pods by the billions into space on intensely powerful magnetic fluxes. Most of those pods were lost in vastness, but a scant few, guided by biologically programmed instincts homing on heat and magnetic fields, reached the worlds of other stars after millions of years of dreamless sleep adrift. Touching down, they tunneled into virgin crust and began the cycle anew.
But from the weirdly inverted Naga point of view, it wasn't that way at all. The universe was a Void surrounded by endless depths of rock; so far as the Nagas themselves were concerned, their voyages across interstellar space were mere excursions from one wall of a rock-walled gulf to another… and the eventless ages separating launch from planetfall and rebirth literally no time at all.
Bracing herself, she reached in once more with her comel-clad hand…
Excitement. Shells of the not-Selfs-that-know move within the Void.
Katya furrowed her brow as she leaned closer, trying to decipher the torrent of alien thoughts.
Enemy… the enemy? The enemy… is coming, and»self«must be protected…
She concentrated on key thoughts. Soon, the Naga would be taken into the Void once more - Wonder! Soaring, dizzying emptiness stretching out forever on every side! - and transported to another world - What is "world?" - where it would be allowed to rejoin a Self that would have no knowledge of humans.
Where is… not-Self-that-knows-called-Dev?
Pressing back frustration, Katya tried to concentrate. Fred, a tiny fraction of its Eriduan "parent," possessed limited intelligence. Talking with it was like trying to talk with a small and ofttimes single-mindedly stubborn child.
Focusing her thoughts, she tried to explain that Dev was someplace else, another world.
What is world?
Where is Dev?
What is love?
That last startled her, and she pulled back again. God, what had Fred managed to pick up from the currents whipping back and forth across the surface of her brain?
Where is Dev?
What is love-Dev?
Damn! She liked Dev… but didn't love him. True, she was worried about him, about the fate of the mission to Athena, but…
"Oh, it's just you. Where's the general?"
Katya whirled at the sound of the voice, her arm pulling free from the Naga with a wet slurp. "Gok, Pol! What the hell are you doing here?"
Pol Danver was one of Sinclair's senior aides, a chubby, self-important man who, Katya sensed, resented her presence, her violation of his territory.
"1 have the same clearance you do," he said. "Listen, I can't find Travis." He emphasized the first name, as though proving a point. "Someone said he was down here with you."
"Hardly. He's on his way to Henry," she told him, naming a town northwest of Jefferson, in a valley high amid the rugged, wooded vastness of the Silverside Cascades.
"Huh. The who-was is we're pulling out."
"We are. The general said to carry out Plan Kappa, then get the hell out. His words, Pol."
Danver looked stubborn. "I'll need authorization for that, Colonel. You understand I can't simply take your word for it."
"It's already downloaded," she snapped back, pointing at a computer access panel on the wall. Danver had been grating on her since she'd come here, and she was in no mood to coddle him. "Palm it for yourself."
The aide hesitated, opened his mouth as though to say something more, then whirled, touched a contact, and stepped through the dissolving door.
Danver, Katya thought, was a jouleech. The word, originally coined to describe a Maian powervore that attached itself to sources of electrical or thermal energy, had come to mean people like Danver who thrived on being close to the centers of political power. His use of Sinclair's first name, for instance, was little more than a means of shouting I'm important.
It was a kind of flattery, she supposed, to be disliked by such a man. Within the rather informal structure of New American politics, Travis Sinclair was not in fact anything more than one of the several dozen delegates representing the North American colony on the planet. In the real world, however, and beyond the posturings and public imagings of Congress, Sinclair was one of a small handful of men and women who were almost single-handedly responsible for creating the Confederation. As chief architect of the Declaration of Reason, Sinclair, more than any other man, could be considered the spirit, the motivating force behind the entire rebellion.
It was only natural that such power should attract people like Danver.
Composing herself, Katya removed the cornel and replaced it in its container. She wasn't sure what she'd managed to communicate to Fred, but at least it was anticipating another voyage through space. Danver was gone by the time she left the chamber.
In Franklin Park, Lassiter's giant image still gestured and mouthed silent platitudes. It looked as though the ViRnews services were playing part of his address to Congress, from the moments just before news of the Imperial's arrival had reached him. God, Katya thought… was the ViRnews media actually downloading that to the public? That was exactly the sort of defeatist propaganda the Imperials would love to see disseminated throughout New America.
What would be next, she wondered, a call for surrender?
Her task here done, she left. Returning to the Sony Building, she completed the transfer of essential computer records to Henry. Five hours later, after battling through the crowds clogging the city, she rejoined her unit at Port Jefferson.
Twenty-eight hours after dropping out of the K-T plenum, the first elements of Ohka Squadron entered close orbit around New America. Eighteen hours after that, Donryu made orbit as well, close-escorted by her retinue of cruisers and transports.
By that time, the destroyers Hatakaze and Yakaze had already docked with the station, and their complements of black-armored Imperial Marines had stormed aboard. There'd been no resistance. All local militia and Confederation troops had withdrawn hours before, escaping in small ships that were now scattering through the system, or riding ascraft down to New America's surface, where several sizable armored units were beginning to congregate.
The marines had orders to secure the station and maintain control but to leave the civilian population alone. Except for a few, inevitable incidents - the initial report downloaded to Kawashima from the station commander included mention of eight dead civilians, forty-five reports of theft or looting, twelve rapes, and one marine murdered by one of his victims - those orders had been carried out precisely. Kawashima was well aware that his presence here was to be one of controlled power.
There was no denying that he wielded terrible power over the 26 Draconis System and its inhabitants. A massive bombardment from orbit, or simply turning Donryu's searing plasma drives toward the planet from a hundred kilometers up, could exterminate every trace of life on New America. But such a brute-force approach would be counterproductive. New America was one of the Hegemony's richest and most productive worlds; more, it was a rarity within the Shichiju, a world that had not required terraforming for humans to live unaided on its surface. If Kawashima captured it by reducing it to a radioactive desert, he would have lost… and in the losing been completely disgraced.
He would employ terror tactics where necessary, certainly, but he would employ them selectively, and with extreme pre
cision. New America's Highport would become his orbital base of operations, though, for now at least, he would remain in his headquarters aboard Donryu, parked a few kilometers beyond the station.
The next step was as obvious as it was necessary.
Kawashima would have to capture Port Jefferson.
* * *
Chapter 8
A war stricter's chief strength lies neither in its armor nor its weaponry, but in its flexibility. With legs instead of tracks, wheels, or jets, with a sealed hull and self-contained life-support system that permit operations in environments ranging from corrosively poisonous to hard vacuum, the warstrider can go almost literally anywhere. Warstriders have climbed mountains and penetrated forests inaccessible to tracked vehicles, have waded swamps, have even operated in the depths of the sea, though their mobility is necessarily limited in such environments.
- Armored Combat: A Modern Military Overview
Warstrider: Jackers Page 9