Battlemind (11 page)

Vic spread his hands. “But I
do
want to know what you saw in there,” he continued. “I’ll be briefed, certainly, and I’ll get to see both the recordings you made and the conclusions from your regular debriefing, but it helps me a lot to have an eyewitness run-down. I’d appreciate hearing… well, your impressions. Of the Web. Of what we’re up against.”

Kara shrugged. “I don’t know what I could say that you don’t know already. I’m really not sure what we learned today mat we haven’t known since the battle here two years ago.” She paused, frowning. “There
was
one thing I wanted to make special mention of. There were times when I was moving around on the planet alone… and Web machines were moving around too, in easy range, but they ignored me. Didn’t even look at me, as near as I could tell.”

“That’s interesting.”

“I thought so. I don’t know what it means, but it seems like a, well, a weakness, maybe. Something we can exploit. I got the distinct impression that they are so wedded to the idea of lots and lots of parts working together as a whole, they tend to neglect individuals. They may not even think of individuals the way we do. Maybe that means they tend to overlook them.”

“That seems a little farfetched.”

“Oh, I don’t know. It’s like you might overlook a couple of scraps of metal lying on the landing deck where you
know
damned well you parked your flitter. The pieces could be a very important part of your flitter’s magdrive train, but you tend to see the flitter’s absence, not the pieces’ presence.”

“Interesting analogy,” Vic said.

Kara reached out one slim hand, holding it above a contact plate on the table. “May I?”

“Of course.”

At her mental command, a patch of skin centered on the heel of her palm hardened into a peripheral contact plate, and she brought it down onto the black translucence of the table’s receiver pad. She felt the thrill of a solid link, gave a second command, and waited as her download trickled through to the AI controlling this compartment’s electronics.

There was a flicker in the air above the table, and then the image coalesced, showing the surface of Core D9837, and the ragged, double-beamed spiral of the Great Annihilator in the sky. In several brief scenes and uneven leaps, she took him through a sketch of the battle, with special attention lavished on the huge, floating pyramid.

“I’m sure you’ve already seen this,” she told him.

“I was following the op realtime,” he told her. “Through the data you were relaying to Ops.” The bald words could not—quite—mask the emotion behind them. He’d been worried. Well, so had she.

“This pyramid thing,” she said, pointing at the holographic image. “It’s new. Or, at least, it’s something we haven’t run across before. I don’t remember seeing anything quite like this at Nova Aquila. It might be primarily a spacecraft design, but I had the impression it was just as comfortable on a planetary surface… or floating above it, rather.”

“We haven’t really seen how they fight
on
a planet,” Vic said, eyes narrowing as he considered the image. “In fact, I think our assumption has been all along that they tend to operate mostly in space.”

“Not entirely true,” Kara reminded him. “We’ve seen them entering and leaving stars.”

“Yes. And when they have that kind of technology, it makes you wonder what they could possibly want something as paltry as a planet for.”

“Raw materials, most likely,” Kara replied.

“Maybe.” He pointed into the image, indicating the distant black and silver towers. “Of course, if this architecture is theirs, it suggests they do still use planets for habitation.”

She shook her head. “I never got close to those, but my impression is they weren’t inhabited so much as
used.”

“Ruins of some other race that used to live there?”

She frowned. “I don’t think so. Core D9837 is a rogue, remember. Its star, if it even ever had one, must have been swallowed up by a black hole a good many millions of years ago.” That, at least, was the prevailing theory of the planetologists aboard
Gauss,
who’d suggested that the barren world’s high velocity through the Core was the result of its being ejected when its star perished. “And the environment. Kuso! I don’t see how any organic life form could have ever lived in there. Organic molecules would break down…” She snapped her fingers. “Like that.”

“The current theory,” Vic said, “is that the Web’s creators evolved on the fringes of the Galactic Core, where the radiation levels weren’t so high. They moved into the Core to tap the more freely available energies in there, and along the way they learned how to download their minds into machine bodies.”

She shrugged. “Sounds plausible, I suppose.”

“Which leaves us still wondering what people who mine stars use planets for.”

“Kuso, Dad, we don’t know anything about them. These people don’t just mine stars. They herd them into great, gokking chorus lines and drop them into giant black holes! As far as I can tell, planets are nothing more than inconveniences to them.”

“It certainly seems unlikely that machines that live in space, if live is the right word, would have any use for buildings,” Vic pointed out.

Kara nodded. “My guess was that those structures might be the upper works of factories or other underground facilities, maybe built that way to shield them against the ambient radiation. I know that as we kept killing their combat machines, more kept appearing from underground, like we were up against an inexhaustible supply. Maybe they use planets, and the raw materials they offer, as sites for manufacturing their machines.” She paused. “There’s also the Naga to think about. The fact that they seemed to have been designed to convert planets into more convenient concentrations of raw material for the Web.”

“True,” Vic said quietly. “Though we obviously still don’t know all there is to know about that.”

“We’d damn well better find out.”

Two years ago, shortly before the Battle of Nova Aquila, Dev Cameron’s probing of the Web concentration at the Galactic Core had demonstrated that the long-mysterious Naga were originally, long, long ago, biomachine constructs controlled by the Web. Humanity had first encountered the Naga almost a century before, when they’d attacked human structures—cities, sky-els, anything with high concentrations of pure metal—on several worlds within the Shichiju. For years, humans had called them Xenophobes and waged a desperate and relentless war of extermination against creatures that, in fact, had been only marginally aware of humans and were inherently unable even to conceive of intelligent beings other than
Self.
In 2541, however, after numerous failures and the loss of millions of lives, Dev Cameron had finally managed to establish communications with them.

What had followed had changed the course both of history and of human technology. It was discovered that the Naga were chemists extraordinaire, that they acted in some ways like extremely complex serially linked computers, and that they could analyze and pattern any material, including human tissue, and even nanotechnically alter it to improve its function. At Mu Herculis, during the Confederation Rebellion, Dev Cameron had accidentally entered into a symbiotic relationship with a planetary Naga, initiating an exchange that had ultimately led to a far better understanding of those creatures.

Symbiosis with the Naga had eventually become commonplace, and it was becoming more so all the time. Twenty-five years ago, most human-machine interfaces had been carried out through cephlinks, electronic devices nanotechnically grown inside the human brain. With the help of the alien DalRiss and their mastery of biological processes at a molecular level, a single cell from a planetary Naga that had had contact with humans could be trained to enter a human body, where it served as an organic neural cephlink… and far more. The result was a symbiont like Kara herself, with a Naga Companion riding her central nervous system that could facilitate her union with machines and with other humans. Xenosymbiotic biotech, it was called, and some hundreds of millions of humans—most of them in the Confederation—had already received Companions and become what many claimed was a new and more advanced type of human.

The one big mystery remaining, of course, had been something the Naga themselves had never been able to clarify, and that was where the creatures had come from in the first place. The discovery of the Web—and the first probing of the Web’s stronghold at the Galactic Core—had demonstrated that the Naga had originally been life forms created by the Web intelligence. Though there still were no solid answers, the best guess of the researchers working on the problem was that the Nagas had been designed as advance scouts of a sort, creatures scattered abroad beyond the Galaxy’s central Core to begin converting worlds into immense factories, steadily converting raw material into… something else. Worlds where a Naga had at last grown so vast that it had broken through to the surface—a world Naga was equivalent in mass to a small moon and numbered hundreds of trillions of cells—were eerily transformed, the surface features molded into bizarre towers, domes, and weirdly sculpted, vaguely organic shapes.

The buildings Kara had seen on Core D9837 had been like distant echoes of the organic-looking architecture grown by mature planetary Naga. It seemed to verify that the Naga were following some very old, embedded programming, orders passed down to them by the Web eons before but that had somehow become garbled along the way. The Naga did not remember the Web, but—more interesting—the Web seemed to recognize Naga, although as a kind of cancer, cells that no longer responded properly to direction or control. In effect, the Naga were continuing to follow their original programming that required them to spread across the Galaxy, preparing planets for the arrival of the Web… but some accident long before had cut them off from Web control and turned them loose on their own. For a long time—some estimates said eight billion years—they’d been slowly spreading across the Galaxy, drawn to worlds of a particular mass and magnetic moment, and colonizing them.

It was a chilling thought that literally billions of worlds across the entire Galaxy might already be infested with wild Nagas, while only a handful had been contacted and domesticated by humans. “Domestication” was a relatively simple process, involving no more than allowing cells from a Naga that had had peaceful contact with humans to exchange data with the uncontacted Naga, but the sheer scale of the alien infestation was staggering.

Vic, Kara noticed, had taken a seat at the table and was now leaning back, his eyes closed, a look of concentration on his face. She remained silent, waiting, until he opened his eyes again.

“Well,
that’s
weird,” he said.

“What is?”

“An oddball effect with Shell Game.” He frowned. “Dr. Norris just called up from Bay Seven. I don’t quite know what to make of it.”

“So what’s the problem?”

“They’ve just recovered one of the Shell Game probes. You know, the ones we’ve been sending through the Stargate to pass disinformation to the Web.” She nodded, and he went on. “We program a certain percentage of them to go through, take a quick look around, and come back. The Web nails some, of course, but most of them have been able to return. We’d never have been able to plan for Core Peek without that reconnaissance data. That’s how we identified all of those rogue planets and bodies in there, including D9837.”

“So, they recovered a probe? What’s so weird about that?”

He looked at her steadily. “If I’m understanding what Norris is trying to say, the probe they just picked up is one scheduled for launch in…” He closed his eyes, concentrating on some inner pulldown data feed from his Companion. “Another five hours from now.”

Kara’s eyes widened. “You mean—”

“I’m afraid so. Somehow, the damned thing came back to us over five hours before we launched it. It looks like the physics boys were right. The Stargate is also a gate through
time.”

Chapter 8

Progress in physics has always moved from the intuitive toward the abstract.

—M
AX
B
ORN

Professor of Theoretical Physics

University of Gottingen

mid-twentieth century
C
.
E
.

Kara was excited. “Time travel! Let’s get down there and have a look at this!”

“Daughter of mine,” Vic said in his best lecturing tone, “you’ve been in the military long enough to know that generals do
not
jump and run at every report from the ranks. Besides, we’re supposed to meet Daren. Damn it, where is he?”

She chuckled. “You know Daren. Tell you what. I’ll bounce down and have a look. Give you a report later, okay?”

“Sounds good to me. I’d just as soon get a briefing later anyway. When physicists like Norris start throwing data-intensive words around, it gives me a headache.
Especially
when they tack the word ‘quantum’ on at the beginning.”

Kara laughed. “I know what you mean. Sometimes I think physics took a distinct wrong turn. Somewhere between Clerk Maxwell and Albert Einstein.”

“Einstein I don’t mind so much,” Vic said. “It’s Heisenberg that worries me. If the guy had just been able to make up his mind…”

Ten minutes later, Kara walked into the hangar bay, watching her step as she crossed an open space cluttered with crates and expendables containers, cables, power feeds, and the low, black-and-yellow shapes of K30 cargo haulers weaving in and around the larger, hulking shapes of teleoperated heavy loaders and military equipment. Spotlights glared from the upper reaches of the gantries and crisscrossing support struts that masked most of the overhead. The noise—a clangor of metal-on-metal, the bark of shouted orders, the hiss of a laser arc welder—joined in ear-pounding cacophony.

Bay Seven was located in the spin-gravity portion of the ship. Someone dropped a heavy tool kit to the metal deck grating from a height of several meters, and the clash nearly made her jump and whirl; somehow, she controlled the reflex and kept walking, searching for Dr. Norris and Lieutenant Coburn. They were supposed to be in here, preparing the next Shell Game probe for its flight into the unknown, and downloading its memory when it returned.