Battlemind (10 page)

Aboard the largest of the refugee orbital colonies, the Great Council of Associatives shared their memories and pondered what course to take next. Clearly, they couldn’t remain here… but they had no particular place to go, either. The Gr’tak had begun probing to other nearby star systems a century before, but the species’s concept of community and mutual association discouraged colonization. In any case, the race had never learned the secret of traveling faster than light, and a colony voyage was a daunting prospect involving centuries. Outside of automated laboratories and research stations, there was no world to offer them refuge.

Besides, there was still the Enemy to consider.

The invaders, whatever they were, clearly were uninterested in organic forms, ignoring them entirely unless they were provoked. Union with another Associative, a large and powerful Associative, would be necessary if organic life in the Galaxy was to protect itself from the machine enemy.

Clearly, there was but a single alternative. The Gr’tak survivors would become nomads, traveling until such an Associative could be found. The Council had carefully considered the possible courses; other novae—exploding stars—had been observed in the heavens for millennia, and it had been noted that the vast majority always seemed to appear within the borders of the constellation of the
di’taak.
In most respects, one direction was very much like another in the absence of any clear sign of interstellar intelligence… but if the novae were an indication that these star-destroyers were traveling in a definite direction, plying their deadly trade, then there was really only one possible choice of course. Eight days after the destruction of their world, the Gr’tak nomad fleet had set off, holding to a course bearing on the constellation of the
eba
tree, on the opposite pole of the Heavenly Sphere from the
di’taak.

Sholai possessed in its stored memories the lives and histories of over fifty previous Sholais, all the same mind, though bodies had died and been replaced time after time. In four millennia, the Fleet had trekked across over eighteen hundred light years. During that time, they’d more than once found worlds similar to Lakah’vnyu, worlds where they might have stopped and set about recreating their lost civilization. But for the Gr’tak, however, the proper way to solve problems was to add additional segments to the whole, bringing to bear new points of view and intuition to look at the problem in a different way. This approach was mirror image to Gr’tak biology, with its interlocking group minds arising from multiple but interconnected individuals. The entire race had been faced by a terrifying, an overwhelming new problem in the form of the invaders that had destroyed their suns and world; with most of the Gr’tak dead—only a few eighties of eighties of eighties had survived aboard the Fleet—the survivors had been hard-pressed to salvage even a fraction of the race’s total knowledge. So many, many, many irreplaceable artificials lost, with all their lore.…

The Gr’tak, what was left of them, at any rate, had to find another Grand Associative, a
whole
and unbroken Associative, with which they could join and mingle data.

That mingling was part tradition, part cold necessity. Gr’tak philosophy was given form by the Great Circle, composed of myriad stars of every color and brightness, the one composed of the many. Most Gr’tak had trouble even imagining solving any problem without the active collaboration and participation of a number of associatives.

Unfortunately, the Galaxy was extremely large. Theory predicted that intelligence should be fairly common, arising as a natural product of basic physics and chemistry on worlds of as many as one out of every thousand suns. If theory was accurate, four million stars or more across the Great Wheel possessed worlds blessed with intelligent life… but finding even one required searching as many as a thousand barren systems, a search that could take a very long time indeed.

Still, they’d tried, stopping at numerous stars as they moved outward from their former home, with the deadly, pearl-gleam light of their suns’ funeral pyre fading behind them. On several, they found the crumbling remnants of civilizations long dead, and once they found a world populated by mossy, many-legged things that made tools from stone but were stubbornly and belligerently uncommunicative.

In any case, the Gr’tak knew that only a culture as advanced as their own would provide the answers they needed. They continued searching.

At long last, though, they’d encountered the faint, non-random crackle and buzz of modulated RF signals, a definite beacon shining in radio light against the misty backdrop of the Great Wheel, signals that spoke of Life… and Mind. The discovery had been purely random; had the Fleet continued on its original course, they might easily have skimmed through the outer fringes of that signal as it expanded at lightspeed across interstellar space and never even noticed it, or the message it carried.

Now, long after the detection of that first signal, space glowed ahead of the Fleet, rich in the muted colors of radio and microwave wavelengths. They were deep inside the volume of expanding radio noise now, a volume encompassing some thousands of stars; directly ahead, the innermost core of that radio shell beckoned, a cluster of discrete radio sources bearing the unmistakable imprint of technic civilization. Samplings were analyzed, ordered, tasted. The Gr’tak knew a quickening excitement. There was a richness of experience here that suggested Associatives on a grand scale.

The nearest star centered on its own glob of radio noise now hung scant light hours ahead of the hard-decelerating Fleet.…

Chapter 7

The Xenophobes
—
or the Naga, as humans eventually called them, after an ancient Terran serpent deity of wealth, peace, and fertility
—
were terribly hard to understand precisely because they were so different. Composed of countless trillions of individual cells, each massing one or two kilograms at most, a planetary Naga was like a single titanic brain, with the cells serving as interlinking neurons. They occupied the crust of the planet they’d infested, tunneling vast chambers underground, converting rock through a kind of natural nanotechnology into organic, living material. Active Naga eventually tunneled through to the surface of their world, manipulated magnetic fields in order to launch bits of themselves to the stars, then settled down into a kind of contemplative senescence… almost as though they were
waiting
for something.

Their view of the universe was strangely twisted from the human; for them, the universe was an endless sea of rock with a central emptiness, a world literally inside-out from what humans perceived. Nonetheless, with contact came communication, and with communication, slowly, came a halting but growing understanding.

—
The Naga: A Study in Xenophobia

P
ROFESSOR
D
EREK
K. B
ROWN

C
.
E
. 2554

The CRS
Carl Friedrich Gauss
had not been designed as a luxury liner, nor as a warship. She mounted lasers and particle beam weapons, but the bow lasers had been installed as sweepers, computer-controlled weapons for disintegrating the bits of dust and cosmic flotsam that might endanger the vessel during high-speed maneuvers. Despite the fact that she was a converted passenger ship, her lines were not particularly elegant; her central spine, just under half a kilometer from blunt prow to massive aft thruster nacelles and made cumbersome by its clutter of blisters, nacelles, and strap-on slush-H tanks, was girdled by a broad ring mounted on a rotation cuff a quarter of the way back from the bow. When she was in free fall, her plasma drives silent, as now, the ring’s stately rotation provided spin gravity. During acceleration, the ring section’s decks, with nanotechnic tiles that reshaped themselves beneath the crew’s and passengers’ feet, adjusted the deck’s angle to compensate for the change in acceleration vector.

As a research ship,
Gauss
would have been comfortable enough, if a bit spartan. With the addition of the Phantoms, however, space was at an absolute premium. The Phantoms’ striderjacks were not the only guests aboard. The company had brought with it eighty-five other officers and enlisted personnel, ranging from mechanics and weapons technicians to General Vic Hagan himself, and his tactical staff.

Her father, Kara knew, had not really chosen
Gauss
as his temporary headquarters just because Kara and the Phantoms had been transferred aboard.
Gauss,
at the moment, was the center of all research into the Web, and he’d wanted to stay on top of the data Kara and her people were bringing in, as it arrived and was digested.

The conference room was on Deck One in the
Gauss’s
ring section, with gravity provided by the ring’s slow spin. The broad, curved viewall screen showed no sign of that rotation, however, since the image was being piped through from a camera mounted in
Gauss’s
stationary prow.

The room had been empty when Kara was ushered in by a Confed marine guard in full dress. The viewall showed the Nova Aquila Stargate, needle-slender at this distance, its silvery length reflecting the light of the two white dwarf stars that circled one another at a distance of some 800,000 kilometers, the Stargate balanced at their center of gravity. Each star emitted a stream of scarlet flame that spiraled around half an orbit to vanish into the ends of the Gate like silken streamers at the end of a twirled baton. The scientists and technicians studying the Web and associated phenomena believed they were channeling star stuff into the Gate and across the Galaxy to some other site… but where that site might be, and why they were mining the stars of plasma stripped from their atmospheres, was still unknown.

Several other ships of the Unified Fleet were visible onscreen as well.
Shinryu,
the big ryu-class flagship of the Imperial Navy contingent.
Constitution
and
Reliant,
a pair of cruisers with the Confed squadron.
Karyu
was the Confederation flag, by far the largest vessel of the entire Confederation fleet. Originally an Imperial ryu carrier, she’d been captured twenty-seven years before at the Second Battle of Herakles. Kara’s father had often joked that he’d named his daughter after the huge battle prize.

Also visible were a half dozen of the big, rough-surfaced starfish shapes that were living DalRiss cityships, each kilometers across, vaster by far than even the largest of the human-built ships.

The Unified Fleet had been parked here, orbiting the double star-Stargate trio at the hopefully safe remove of nearly one astronomical unit, where they could keep a watchful eye on the enigmatic Stargate. The fleet’s actual eyes were much closer in, of course—robot flyers teleoperated by pilots maintaining I2C links from both the
Karyu
and the
Shinryu.
If Web machines emerged through the Gate’s invisible portals, the fleet would know about it instantly, rather than in the seven to eight minutes it would take for news of the arrival to crawl out from the Gate by more conventional means.

The door hissed open at her back. “Kara!” a familiar voice said. “I’m so sorry to keep you waiting!”

She turned, smiling. Her father, General Victor Hagan, advanced toward her with outstretched arms. He, too, was in full dress uniform, the two-toned grays of the Confederation Navy. Normally, he would have been stationed aboard
Karyu
with the Unified Fleet’s Confederation Military Command Staff, but he’d been crowded in with the other guests aboard the research ship for almost a month, now… and he still always managed to present the crisp perfection in dress and bearing of the professional military officer. Kara wasn’t sure how he managed it. He must, she decided wryly, grow himself a new uniform every couple of hours to keep it looking that sharp.

She also suspected he donned fresh-grown grays each time he was going to meet with her, for whatever reason.
He can be sentimental that way, sometimes,
Kara thought with a secret smile.

“Hi, Dad,” she said, returning his hug. “You didn’t keep me waiting at all.”

He pushed her back and held her at arm’s length for a moment, studying her face. “You’re okay?”

“Clean bill of health. No static.”

He let her go and glanced around the empty room. “I told Daren you were back,” he said, glancing around. “I was expecting him to be here.”

Kara shrugged, unconcerned. “The day my brother can be anywhere on time.…”

“He has been busy,” Vic said. He looked at Kara a moment longer, then grinned with evident relief. “Damn, I’m so glad you’re back. Back and.…” He broke off, embarrassed.

“And still sane?” Kara said, filling in the blank. “Or as sane as I ever was, at least.”

“The casualty figures haven’t exactly been encouraging,” Vic said.

“No, they haven’t,” Kara agreed. She cocked her head to the side. “You know, Dad, it seems sometimes that the high brass has declared open season on striderjacks like us. Each mission they dream up is hairier than the last one. We’re going to lose more good people if they keep sending us into hellholes like the Core.”

“How was it?” Vic asked. “How was it
really?”

Kara suppressed a shudder, crossing her arms, her hands clasping her elbows close to her sides. “Well, you’ll get my report when I write the thing and download it. I just came up from the intelligence debrief on the war deck, so I haven’t exactly had time for the routine scutwork.”

“I’m not looking for your report,” he told her. “I wouldn’t normally get to see it anyway, unless I asked for it special. And then, well, it looks bad.”

She nodded. Having a general for a father, especially one as high-ranking and as powerfully connected as
the
Victor Hagan, could be a real problem, especially when she was trying to carve out her own career as a Confed military officer. The fact that her mother was Senator Katya Alessandro of the Confederation Senate made it even worse. There was always the assumption—unspoken, of course, but very real—that she’d gotten her rank because of her family connections.