Rebellion (22 page)

She couldn’t tell if he’d heard her or not.

From fifteen meters, it was clear that the Xeno Cobra, which she had always thought of as a combat machine akin in spirit, if not form, to a human warstrider, shared some of the traits of living creatures. Its surface had the luster-less sheen of a metal-plastic or metal-ceramic composite; its interior was wet and pulsing, like the body cavity of something alive.

Where, Katya wondered, was the dividing line between creator and created, between tool-user and tool? The Xenophobes obviously possessed a technology similar in some respects to the bioengineering of the DalRiss. Rather than manufacturing tools, the Xenos grew them within their own bodies, building them molecule by molecule through some means of inward-turned perception and manipulation incomprehensible to humans.

A shudder as icy as the touch of the comel on her arm shivered down the length of Katya’s spine. She was afraid, and what she feared was not the Xenophobe strangeness or ugliness of outward form; the things were so unlike anything recognizable that there was nothing to trigger Katya’s own xenophobic instincts, instincts that might have left her screaming had the creature before her in some way resembled, say, a spider, a reptile, or some other, more familiar, stranger.

Instead, it was the Xeno’s unknown and perhaps unknowable qualities that terrified. Did it see her as a threat? As lunch? Did it even see her at all? And when it finally reacted to her presence, as it soon must, what would it do? Her right hand brushed against the holster riding low on her hip. She hesitated, then flipped open the catch, freeing the Toshiba Type 07 laser pistol resting there. Not that it would hurt a Xenophobe Alpha any more than a flashlight might… but its weight against her thigh was strangely, irrationally reassuring.

Eight meters, now. Had it seen her yet? She felt an unpleasant tingling against the bare skin of her upper arm, her right hand, her face and neck exposed by the mask. What was the nano count here, she wondered? She could imagine the dead layers of her epidermis beginning to dissolve under the unseen assault of Xeno nano-D. Or was the tingling psychosomatic only? She couldn’t tell.

She was afraid.

Under the direction of its organic components, the rock threader was repairing itself. »Self« did not, could not, differentiate between those parts of its body that were organic and those smaller, internal fragments that were complex, self-replicating machines, for that symbiosis between organism and living machine was old, old… billions of years old, perhaps. Even the far vaster and more able memories of Self had long since lost all but hazy impressions of its own evolutionary genesis within the caverns of some cooling, far-distant world, and those impressions were not part of the group-mind memories retained by »self«.

It did retain memories of Self, of course, memories of a vast and dazzling intelligence from which »self« had been agonizingly torn at some vaguely recognized period of time in the past. Alone, here on the thin and alien shores of the great Void at the heart of the universe, it knew that its one chance of completion was to repair the damage it had suffered so that the threader could return to the warmth and wholeness of Self. The damage was not severe; worst was the loss of nearly half of the individual fragments of »self« that directed the threader; these were being replaced from the pods still rising on the magnetic sea from the not-Rock passage nearby.

Since it experienced its surroundings as blendings of separate sensations from separate parts of its being, the group organism did not think in terms of linear time, but it knew that it would return to Self in the not-distant future. Stored within its inorganic memory were millions of bits of data acquired during its short stay here at the edge of the Void. Self would especially savor the taste of data about the mysterious opponents here, the not-Selves that, impossibly, moved and fought and destroyed almost as though they were somehow alive. Self would welcome that data, replicating it and distributing it throughout the body for future buddings of »selves«.

And »self« would again be part of Self, merging »consciousness« with Consciousness, »mind« with Mind. The pain, the loss, the utter diminishment would at last be gone.

The emotion-analogue shivering through its separate units at that group thought might have been recognizable to humans as joy.

»Self« possessed eighteen separate external senses. None of these quite corresponded to sight, though three perceived and measured electromagnetic energy falling upon the surfaces of its bodies. Most were distantly analogous to human senses of taste or smell, enabling »self« to sample its chemical and electrical environment. Only one, sensitive to nearby heat sources at frequencies of between 10
¹²
and 10
¹⁴
hertz, created something within the group mind that could bethought of as a visual image. Another, sensitive to vibrations through the surrounding rock, was something like hearing.

Still, »self« was only dimly aware of the approaching not-Self, a pattern of greater heat against lesser heat, a shambling but regular tremor of vibrations through the rock, a thing almost invisible. In its Boolean framework of is and is-not, »self« could perceive the heat-shape and recognize it as not-Self.

Neither was it Rock, for it was moving, though it did taste, rocklike, of chemical salts and hydrocarbon compounds, of water and incredibly pure traces of metal and less-identifiable but apparently artificial substances. If it moved, was it alive the way »self« was alive? That was difficult to say, though the thing jittered and flickered with the electrochemical currents that mimicked, distantly, the more powerful ebb and flow of life within »self’s« group being.

The tastes of chemical salts and water were very strong now, and »self« recoiled. It could absorb most substances, using its internal chemical control to disassemble and rearrange their chemical structures in order to grow inorganic machine components or to reproduce itself. Some substances, however, posed special difficulties, and liquid electrolytic compounds—such as salt water—could be deadly, for they could disrupt the electrical conductivity within »self’s« tissues and inorganic components, a disruption equivalent to intense pain that was potentially fatal. Self, »self« remembered, had more than once sensed vast reservoirs of salt water within the universe of Rock and drawn back from them, unable to approach.

And a glowing column massing nearly sixty kilos that was at least seventy percent salt water was now moving steadily toward »self« with something that might be interpreted as grim purpose.

Though it wasn’t aware of the fact, »self« possessed one emotion fully in common with humans, a reflexive and primitive urge toward fight or flight basic to any species’ survival.

»Self« was afraid.

The wounded Xenophobe machine/creature was only a handful of meters away now, a limp, black tube thicker than Katya was tall. The entire mass was faintly pulsing with some inner life, like the steady thud of some monstrous heart.

One of the broken travel spheres lay at her feet. Inside its meter-wide bowl-shaped hollow, three Xenophobes floated on greasy slime trails, black slug-things like lumps of grease that were somehow managing to slide up the walls of their prisons, defying gravity. Their movements did not appear to be due to muscular contractions, or any other mode of organic locomotion Katya was familiar with. Individual Xenophobe cells, apparently, could also somehow use or manipulate the ambient magnetic field.

Within the opening in the Cobra’s flank, dozens of Xeno bodies appeared to be meshed together in a network of thread-thin, translucent filaments. It reminded her, somewhat, of a crude model of a human brain, with neurons joined to neurons in a complex web of cell bodies, axons, and dendrites, multiple paths whose traceries determined the shape of human thoughts.

That, Katya knew, was a simplistic interpretation colored by her own prejudices of what was and was not life. Each individual Xenophobe cell, a slug shape the size of her head, was an incredibly complex mix of living and inorganic parts. Was it intelligent apart from the main body? No one knew, not even Dev, for his communication had been with a network of some trillions of the things spanning the crust of an entire planet. Most researchers assumed that a single Xeno unit was unintelligent… no brighter than a single neuron in a human brain.

But was that true? Impulsively, Katya stooped above a Xenophobe sliding slowly across the ground between the broken sphere and the Cobra, thrusting her comel-clad hand down and touching its glistening surface, feeling its black, soft-skinned slickness through the cold and cushioning layers of the living DalRiss translator.

…
move… move… move…

… and a desperate, soul-wrenching need to be joined to others… emptiness… loneliness…

Katya screamed, a despairing wail reflecting the emptiness coursing through her soul.

“Kat!” Hagan’s shrill cry cut through the static. “Kat! Are you—”

“I’m fine!” She hoped he could hear her. Her compatch didn’t pack much power. Dazed, she stood, her knees threatening to give way entirely and pitch her back to the ground. Lone Xeno organisms were not intelligent. That was clear enough now, though they burned with a kind of programmed lust for some particular action. The comel, she realized with a kind of detached wonder, had somehow translated that programming, the blind instinct to join with others of its kind, into something recognizable as emotion.

An empty wanting, a hunger that had nearly overwhelmed her.

“
Sssss
—in the way, Katya! Move aside—
ssst!”

“Negative! Negative! Nothing’s wrong!”

Nothing
was
wrong… for the Xenophobe horror a few meters before her remained unmoving. From here, she could see the intricate weave of its repair work around the edges of the hole in its side, as fibers grew from tar-dripping edges according to some master program whose workings she could appreciate but only dimly perceive. The Xeno organism she’d touched was flowing up the side of the Cobra now, and into the embrace of outflung, living fibers. Almost, she imagined, she could sense a kind of relief in the way it slithered in close against a hundred identical, glistening bodies.

Something reached for her from the interior of the Xeno combat machine, a tar-black pseudopod that was part molasses-thick liquid, part living units.

How do they do that?
she wondered. The creatures possessed nothing like skeletons, internal or external, but working together they seemed able to exercise considerable strength. Perhaps the micromachines inside their bodies somehow interlocked, creating temporary skeletal support.

The arm swayed closer, an extension of self like the hungry embrace of an amoeba. Dazed, Katya took a half step back, then stopped. Was this an attack, or…

Damn it, we’re here to try to communicate with these things!
She thrust her comel-covered arm forward, touching the swaying, dripping extension of self growing from the Xeno machine’s wounded side.

She touched the mind of
»self«
and nearly fainted.

The pseudopod spilled down over her arm… her chest… her head, engulfing her in blackness.

Chapter 18

At the bottom of the Xenophobe hierarchy is what we call the cell, because it seems to resemble a single, gigantic neuron within a complex nervous system. Like a plant or animal cell, it is composed of smaller units and is quite complex, a living organism that can survive for a time isolated from the parent body. This cell is constructed from something like cytoplasm, microscopic subcells that are analogous to the cells in our own bodies, and nanomachines. It measures perhaps twenty-five centimeters across and masses about a kilogram. As far as we can tell, it can carry memory, perhaps a kind of organic programming, but is not, of itself, intelligent.

A number of cells networked together, however, can display a definite intelligence, even though that intelligence appears to be quite different from anything we are familiar with.

—from a report given before the

Hegemony Council on Space Exploration

Devis Cameron

C.E.
2542

From his vantage point halfway up the barren slope of Henson’s Rise, Vic Hagan watched with dumbstruck horror as something like molten asphalt extruded itself from the wrecked Cobra and spilled over Katya’s body, engulfing her. Lipinski was screaming at him over the comlink to fire,
fire,
but he couldn’t shoot without hitting Katya, who might still be alive.

He kicked his RLN-90 into motion, lumbering down the slope toward the Xenophobe machine. He needed to do
something,
but he could only watch helplessly as the black, tarry mass withdrew back into the opening in the Cobra’s side, leaving nothing behind at all.

“My God, it
swallowed
her!”

And now, the Cobra was in motion, gliding with a serpent’s undulations toward a black-pit fissure at the center of the crater. Hagan had seen similar craters on Loki and elsewhere. They were called tunnel entrances, though there was no actual tunnel as such, and they appeared to be gateways of a sort to the network of SDTs that formed the Xenos’ underground highway net. Xenophobe machines had been seen leaving and entering those fissures, which consisted of rock somehow turned plastic and yielding by intense magnetic fields.

“Lieutenant, you gotta help her!”

Hagan bit back a curse. Lipinski’s shrill commentary was doing little to help the situation, even if the kid was right. Experimentally, he raised his Scoutstrider’s right arm, engaging the targeting system for his autocannon.

The agonizing part of the situation was not knowing whether Katya was alive or dead. He’d just watched the thing gulp her down whole… but he’d seen ViRrecordings of the first contact on Alya B-V, where Dev Cameron had been nearly completely engulfed by a mass of Xenophobe cells lining the walls of a subterranean cavern. This
could
be the same thing and Katya might still be alive inside that monster, but if so she was being kidnapped. Once the damaged Cobra reached the tunnel entrance, there’d be nothing anyone could do for her.