Warstrider

by William H. Keith

  He was sharply reminded of the greaseballs, the organic, sluglike creatures he’d seen before. These were similar, but each hand-sized bioform was imbedded in a gelatinous ooze, an ooze that extended across the rock wall like amoebic pseudopods, each arm touching the others around it. Each was dark-colored, almost black, but under direct lighting they turned a murky and translucent gray in which he could make out bits and pieces of debris imbedded within the jelly.

  Or were they internal organs of some kind? Or lumps of undigested food? Or unborn young? He didn’t know what it was he was looking at, but it/they indisputably was/were alive. The smooth-bodied masses were flattening, stretching as he watched, as though spreading themselves beneath the light. He wondered if it was the light that was attracting them, or his own presence.

  He glanced at his readouts, checking for the nano count, but there was none. The absence of nanotechnic disassemblers was only mildly reassuring. Dev was trapped in a well a hundred meters deep… completely surrounded by Xenophobes.

  And yes, they were definitely reacting to his presence, stretching out from the walls to envelop him. …

  Chapter 30

  At first, all the One sensed was heat, a warmly glowing mass that dropped into the One’s midst, as dazzling as the ignition of a flare in the depths of a cave. Reacting with an instinct inherent within the One, individual components began closing on the object, spreading their receptor surfaces to the fullest extent to drink this bounty which had appeared so unexpectedly, at levels so far above the comfortable Depths below.

  After a moment, as the One considered the heat source, emotions surfaced from somewhere deep within its being… surprise at this unexpected gift, and… curiosity.

  Those ancient twistings of the Self’s mind had not been lost or forgotten after all.

  The One knew nothing of humans, of course, knew nothing of the oddly formed, strangely bilateral machine that was the source of so much radiant heat. In the trinary logic of the One, there was only Rock, Not-Rock, and Self. From the One’s point of view, the Universe was an unimaginably vast cavern, an empty gulf of Not-Rock sealed in Rock, which was itself surrounded by an endless, semimolten sea of life-giving heat.

  The One occupied one minute piece of that Cavern, between the heat-sea and the temperature fluctuations of the Gulf. Elsewhere in the Great Cavern, it knew, other Ones dwelt, parts of Self, though manywere still Children of the Dark, primitive and mindless.

  This glowing apparition was neither the comfortable, data-rich recognition of Self, nor the empty blankness of Not-Rock. It must be, therefore, Rock… but that strange subset of Rock that moved of its own volition, like Self, but which was decidedly Not-Self.

  The concept was almost unimaginable, but the One had run into such paradoxes before. Among the Children of the Dark, long ago, during the first dim stages of consciousness as Children, memory was passed as genetic coding from Child to Child with each tripartite conjugation. The One possessed memories extending back to the Beginning, eons past, and within a portion of the Great Cavern far removed indeed from this place where it found itself now. It remembered the Selfs-that-were-Not-Selfs that had threatened the Children of the Dawn… and that had appeared in different forms during many of the Cycles since. It remembered the Selfs-that-were-Not-Selfs that had threatened this cycle.

  Always, those Selfs-that-were-Not-Selfs had been threats.

  Protection from such threats, of course, was the duty of the Children, necessary if the Cycles were to continue. The concept of “death” was alien to the One since the One would effectively live for as long as the heat sea endured. But it did comprehend the extinction of individual Children, a kind of transformation into the void of Not-Rock, a timeless hell of nonexistence.

  Never in all its memories had the One itself been threatened with extinction… but never in all its memories had the One been threatened after the Children had become One.

  This cycle, it seemed, was different, horribly so. …

  Chapter 31

  The Nihongo word for ‘nightmare’—akumu—and for ‘demon’ or ‘devil’—akuma—obviously have linked etymologies. The image is of the demons that haunt our sleep.

  —The Gods Within

  Viktor Sergeivich Kubashev

  C.E. 2314

  “Captain! We’ve lost Delta Four!”

  Hagan’s call caught Katya as she completed a rocket-assisted leap across a narrow chasm. Somehow she maintained her concentration, coming to a halt with a metallic clash of actuators, hydraulics, and armored flanges.

  “What happened?” she snapped. Swinging the Warlord right, she acquired Hagan’s Manta visually, then broke into a ground-eating lope across the tortured landscape. “Where is he?”

  “Landed on a thin surface, like ceramic, stretched across the mouth of a big tunnel. Surface gave way, and down he went. Watch yourself, Captain. There may be more covered holes like that.”

  Cursing her careless impatience, she slowed her pace, selecting each piece of ground before she trod on it. This part of the alien city was so completely covered over with Xenophobe forms that each step was still a matter of guesswork and luck, but by avoiding flat, circular patches that looked as if they might be the masked openings of vertical tunnels, she swiftly reached the Manta’s side.

  Dev’s Commandos were already clambering out of their Crab APW, seventeen men and women cumbersome in black armor and slung weapons. Beyond, the shattered surface Dev had landed on revealed the gaping, night-black maw of a pit, the ruin slick and smooth as though polished by wind and water across the centuries.

  Katya had wondered at Dev’s decision to include Cameron’s Commandos in this recon but hadn’t questioned him about it. He had proven himself right at Regio Aurorae: there were things men in armor could do that were impossible or difficult for a warstrider, and men and striders could complement one another on a mission.

  Katya approached the pit, where troops in black and red armor were breaking out strands of monofilament from external stores compartments on the Crab. Gingerly she edged past the crunchies to peer down the open shaft. Blackness yawned half a meter in front of her feet. The singsong wailing on G and H bands was particularly strong here, but once she thought she heard a human’s voice, Dev’s voice, filtered by the blasting of static. She probed with a ranging laser. Eighty-five meters, a long way to fall. She shifted to her communications laser, opening the beam wide to tag the entire bottom of the well, praying for a response, any response.

  Nothing.Which could mean that Dev was dead, his strider a twisted mass of wreckage at the bottom of the well.

  Or it could mean that his lasercom gear was damaged, or that he was alive but unconscious or disconnected or that he’d moved into a side passage and the laser line of sight was blocked, or any of several other possibilities. If the lasercom gear was working and the Ghostrider was in the L-LOS, though, she ought to be able to establish a link with the LaG-42’s AI, even if Dev was out of the link.

  “We thought we might have picked up some light down there a moment ago,” a woman’s voice said in her mind.

  She turned her attention back from that dizzying partial circle of night, focusing instead on the armored figure standing beside her. “Who’re you?”

  “Sergeant Wilkins, sir. Lieutenant Cameron’s team leader.”

  “You think… he’s still alive?”

  “He could be. If he was able to orient himself and use his jets for the landing. We’re getting ready to go down and check.”

  “Check? How?”

  Wilkins jerked a gloved hand over her shoulder, toward the Crab. “Buckythread. We have enough to lower five people down there. I’ll take an armed team down, and we’ll see if we can find him.”

  Katya swiveled her sensors back to the pit, probing the depths once more with her ranging laser. Eighty-five meters. No… on the far side she got a reading of one hundred three meters. Dev’s crash must have caused a partial cave-in. She could imagine the descent blocked b
y debris hanging from one wall of the tube, tangled in the blackness.

  Blackness. She suppressed a shudder.

  “There could be Xenos down there, Sergeant.”

  “Yes, sir.” She hefted her subgun. “That’s why me and my four guys’ll be going in armed.”

  “Three guys, Sergeant.”

  “Beg pardon, Captain?”

  “You and three of your guys. I’m coming with you.”

  Wilkins hesitated. “That might not be such a good idea, sir.”

  You’re right about that, Sergeant, she thought. She felt exhilarated, even a little crazy, and she could feel the terror of the blackness beneath her feet.

  But Dev was down there, and she was going to get to him. If he was unconscious in a damaged warstrider, a striderjack might be necessary to talk with the AI and help pull him free. She had to go. Into the dark.

  “No arguments, Sergeant,” she said. “Break out an extra subgun for me. Torolf? You’ve got my baby until I get back.”

  “Sure thing, Captain.”

  She began severing her link with the Warlord.

  Chapter 32

  Within the past century, akuma has evolved a secondary meaning born of this linguistic relationship. As researchers continue to use cephlinkage and implant technology to delve into the unfolding mysteries of the mind, akuma has come to refer to those very special, personal demons of our own creation, those that drive us from within to greatness… or to catastrophe.

  —The Gods Within

  Viktor Sergeivich Kubashev

  C.E. 2314

  Dev tensed, ready to twitch the muscles that would trigger his Ghostrider’s flamer. At such close range he would kill hundreds of the monsters.

  But he hesitated to fire.

  First, of course, there was no escape from this cavern that he could see. The backblast would certainly bring down the crumbling tunnel walls, destroying Morgan’s Hold as well as the Xenos.

  But there was more to it than self-preservation. Never, so far as Dev knew, had Xenophobes ever been seen living within the black labyrinths of their tunnels…never. Robots and striders both had attempted to penetrate openings on various human worlds, but communication was impossible and none had emerged. These creatures, bathed in the radiance of his lights, were exhibiting behavior strikingly different from the individuals he’d seen before. Those others had appeared to be interconnected as they crawled free of their opened travel pods, but these seemed to be woven together, moving but permanently connected, a living network that reminded Dev of individual cells tied together as parts of a single, larger organism.

  Was that the answer? Were the Xenos part of a group mind, one that Man had not yet learned to communicate with? That didn’t seem likely. Xeno efforts, while sufficient to kick humans off eleven worlds so far, had been victorious more because of the strength of numbers and the inaccessibility of their deep subsurface nests. Individual masses of Xenos had seemed disorganized, even chaotic in their attacks. He remembered human attempts to analyze their attack plans, and smiled inwardly at a dawning truth. There had been no attack plans to analyze.

  No wonder the Imperial War Staff had been baffled.

  Hell, there was so much about them humans didn’t know. He relaxed slightly, still watchful but unwilling to start the fight. He would wait and see what this crowd did.

  Yes, they were definitely reacting to the strider’s presence, sliding toward it, but very, very slowly. He cut the Ghostrider’s external lights, but it didn’t seem to make any difference. Dev nodded to himself. He’d begun to suspect that the creatures were reacting to heat rather than light, and his experiment confirmed that. There were no eyes on the things that he could see, no organs of sight… unless the whole translucent glob was photosensitive, and he did not think that that was the case.

  Okay, the critters were thermovores, heat-eaters. His strider had blasted the cavern with a hell of a lot of heat when it fired its jets, so much so that his strider’s AI was battling to dump excess heat into the surrounding air, which was quite a bit hotter than the strider’s vents. Outside temperature… fifty-one Celsius.

  It occurred to Dev that the heat plume he’d seen earlier was not waste heat from industrial processes, but a means of planetary engineering on as large a scale as the attempts to remake Loki’s atmosphere. These creatures liked heat Maybe that was the reasoning behind those giant tunnels, a system for bringing heat from deep within the planet’s interior to the surface. The excretions on the surface of GhegnuRish certainly seemed designed to catch sunlight, possibly for the purpose of transforming it into heat.

  He wondered if cold might be an effective weapon, then abandoned that line of thought. He’d seen these creatures blindly questing on the surface of Loki, where the air temperature hovered at thirty to fifty below. Hardly a choice environment for a life-form that lived off heat.

  There was a way to find out once and for all… possibly.

  Communication.

  The DalRiss Lifemasters aboard the Darwin claimed that the new Translators they’d engineered would be able to bridge the communication gap between a human cephlink implant and the Xenophobes. A special, newly devised program designed to facilitate that communication had been downloaded into Dev’s RAM before the drop, and his orders were to try to use it if the opportunity presented itself. This, Dev thought unhappily, was certainly an opportunity.

  There was only one hitch. The Translator had to establish physical contact with both Dev and the Xeno. To use the damned thing, he was going to have to break linkage and leave the protection of his strider, walk out there, and touch the goking things.

  That might not be as much of a problem if the Xenos were bubbling masses of grease blobs and jelly lying in the open shell of a travel pod. But this!…

  Switching his external lights back on, he continued to scan the Xenophobes outside. There were thousands of them, stretched across every surface he could see. The one thing going for him was that none of the Xenophobes was wearing armor. If a stalker or even a Gamma appeared down here, he wouldn’t have a chance.

  Dev thought about leaving the relative security of Morgan’s Hold, and shuddered inwardly. He remembered his trek across that flame-blasted battlefield on Loki, unprotected, alone. He remembered the battle outside the Warlord, and the terror and pain when the Gamma had grabbed his ankle.

  “Well,” he told the encircling creatures, speaking aloud. “We could just sit and stare at each other for the rest of the week while you soak up my lights.”

  There was no reply, of course. The amorphous forms were definitely closer now.

  No choice, he thought. I’ll just have to meet them on their terms.

  Silently he ran through the list of mental commands that would break the link. Abruptly he was lying in the cramped and stifling dark, his body protesting with the usual postjack list of aches and pains and stiff-muscled complaint as he pulled the VCH from his head and unjacked the feeds.

  For an instant he was deaf, dumb, and blind to the universe. Then he was awake, alone inside the cramped and ill-smelling claustrophobia of the Ghostrider’s command module. The heat was oppressive. It was like sitting in an oven, and he could scarcely breathe. In seconds he was bathed in sweat, reeking of fear and exertion.

  Fumbling for the pressure latch of an equipment locker, he opened it and extracted a gas mask. He wished he could wear an E-suit helmet, but even with positive pressure from his PLSS feeds, atmospheric carbon dioxide could still diffuse into his helmet air, and even a tiny rise in his CO2 partial pressure could cause unconsciousness, then death. He slipped the mask on, pressed the seals against his face, and tested the airflow.

  Good. It was easier to breathe now.

  He thought about the horrors waiting just outside the strider’s hull, and nearly balked.

  Akumu. The Nihongo word meant nightmare, and this was Dev’s own, very personal nightmare, to step outside the protection of artificial armor, exposed, vulnerable.

  Re
aching into the equipment locker, he extracted a gleaming canister. Touching the seals, he broke it in two, spilling the formless blob of gray jelly within onto his stomach. It looked very much like the things plastered over the cavern walls outside. With some distaste—he still hadn’t gotten used to the feel of these things—he pressed the fingers of his bare right hand into the mass. Slowly the amoebic mass began oozing up his fingers, coating the back of his hand, then trickling around his wrist and across his palm. In a few moments his hand was encased in what looked and felt like a glistening wet, translucent gray rubber glove, with an ugly, gray-brown mass clinging to his forearm.

  Careful not to bump the cornel, he untangled himself from the webbing. As he lifted his arm, he caught sight of the artificial symbiont by the faint light of his console, and smiled. His hand and arm felt cooler now; the cornel, like the Xenophobes outside, was a thermovore. It was feeding on the heat of Dev’s body.

  “Okay, fella,” he said. “We’re about to find out if you live up to your billing. I sure hope you can speak the natives’ language. …”

  Dev reached up and cracked the commander’s access hatch.

  Chapter 33

  Dreams, fecund musings,

  Reality in the world

  I shape for myself.

  —Imperial haiku,

  mid-twenty-fifth century

  Katya caught herself with one hand as she started to swing, the buckythread suspending her from her harness like a spider on the end of a very long strand of webbing. Buckythread—a nanosynthesized single-chain molecule made of carbon atoms linked together in a very long, geodesic tube—was immensely strong, stronger than diamond fiber, so strong that to cut it required the application of specially programmed nano to disassemble the carbon-carbon bonds. There was no danger that the thread would break and send her plunging into the well.