Battlemind (9 page)

With so much traffic crisscrossing the Galaxy, it was inevitable that many of those exploring minds should encounter the Web. Sooner or later, any outward-questing people would decide to investigate the peculiar phenomena emanating from the Galaxy’s Core. Too, it was inevitable for any spacefaring culture to eventually stumble across one of the huge, spinning structures, thread-slender in proportion to width but massing as much as a giant planet, that were positioned at the gravitational balance points of thousands of post-nova white-dwarf pairs scattered across the Galaxy.

At the time of the battle on Core D9837, for instance, the Djenna were preparing their own penetration of the Galaxy’s central regions. A warrior species, quadrupeds descended from six-limbed carnivore stock, the conquerors of two hundred worlds, they’d encountered a stargate caught between two orbiting white dwarfs a few light centuries from their home cluster. Analysis of the flight paths of alien vessels moving toward and away from the gate structure suggested that one path in particular might lead to the aliens’ home system. Eager to discover another
chu-
enemy with which to engage in honorable war and hero-naming—the Yath, lamentably, were now extinct—the Djenna prepared their warfleet to deliver the necessary First Challenge.

Some ten thousand light years to antispinward of the Djenna homeworlds, the Xaxerg!k readied their four-hundred-twelfth attempt to pass through another enigmatic, whirling cylinder recently discovered a few sevens of light years from their homeworld. Descended from scavengers, these armor-plated creatures—reminiscent of Terra’s annelids but far larger—had a dozen-odd senses that were distant analogues of smell or taste, employed in distinguishing among subtle variations in soil chemistries. Stolid and somewhat unimaginative, the Xaxerg!k were possessed of a tremendously stubborn persistence. Their first 411 probes had gone through their stargate and vanished, never returning; patiently, they readied number 412, not necessarily expecting success but unable to conceive of a new strategy that might produce better results.

On the other side of the Galaxy, opposite the Xaxerg!k in relation to the Core, the Seiliag had already encountered the Web some hundreds of years earlier, when living machines had descended from the green-yellow skies of that species’ world and begun disassembling their cities. The Seiliag, evolved from arboreal cephalopods dwelling throughout the planet’s littoral regions, had the knack for growing metal-crystal cities in the treetops of their coastal
garthech
forests that were themselves living beings drawing chlorine from the Cl
₂
N
₂
atmosphere and excreting metallic salts. For reasons unknown, the Web creatures had relished the crystalline city-beings, dismantling them and hauling the shards skyward. The Seiliag had never left their world and had no effective means of fighting back. For the past three hundred of their world’s long years, they’d withdrawn further and further into the dwindling
garthech
forests, waging a desperate guerrilla war against the invaders. For their part, the Web machines never seemed to be entirely aware that they were fighting a war at all… but any attack on them or their operations brought swift and certain retaliation.

Five thousand light years rimward from the embattled world of the Seiliag, the *#* were nearing extinction at last. Warm-blooded, trisexual amphibians with a static culture, an introspective turn of mind, and a love of arithmetic poem cycles, they possessed little in the way of technology and had no interest in exploring the universe. They had not encountered the Web directly and were unaware of the existence of any other intelligences in the universe around them. Twenty-three hundred years earlier, however, the Web had detonated two close-orbiting F-class stars less than two light years from the *#* system. The *#* sun, an old, stable K4 star, put out relatively little ionizing radiation, and the mutation rate on the system’s sole inhabited world was low. Life on that world, including the *#* themselves, was not well adapted to the significantly higher radiation levels generated by the storm of charged particles that swept through the system a few years after the two neighboring stars brightened to a dazzling, day-visible brilliance. Among those *#* that did not sicken and die from direct exposure, many died of starvation as the many-legged fungi-arthropod symbionts that were the amphibians’ primary food source grew scarce, and more and more *#* egg mats rotted in the birthing pools, failing to yield even a single wriggler… or worse by far, hatching monsters. The radiation storm was past now, and rad levels were falling everywhere, but the balance had tipped against the *#*, their gene pool already so depleted and nonviable mutations so common that the worldwide *#* population, never robust, was plummeting. The fact that three sexes were necessary for procreation instead of the more usual two only complicated things, making successful matings rare and sealing the amphibians’ doom.

And eighty-five hundred light years further rimward, quite close now to the worlds known to Man, the refugee fleet of the Gr’tak continued on a quest that had already lasted through nearly four thousand years.

Humanity was destined never to meet any of the first four of those disparate peoples—Djenna, Xaxerg!k, Seiliag, and *#*. All would be extinct long before humans would have a chance to reach their parts of the Galaxy. In the case of the Djenna that was, perhaps, just as well; the immense warrior quadrupeds held a peculiar reverence for bloodshed and warfare that could have led only to grief for one, and more likely both, species, had they and the humans met. It was a pity that humans would not be able to exchange thoughts and philosophical points of view with the other three, though. The Xaxerg!k had much to teach about persistence and patience, the Seiliag about symbiotic relationships and the essential ecological unity of Life, the *#* about inner peace and the beauty of mathematics; and all three species could have learned much in turn, had they been able to communicate with humans.

The Gr’tak refugees, however, were nearing human space, drawn on by the steady pulse of microwave and modulated radio transmissions that they’d first picked up over six hundred light years out from Sol and the Imperial Shichiju. Their fleet numbered some ten thousand ships, ranging in size from the small single-seater patrol vessels like that piloted by Sholai, to immense structures that had begun as space stations orbiting lost Lakah’vnyu but had been given drives and been transformed into spacefaring arks when the Enemy had fallen upon them from the depths of space.

Sholai was still alive… or, rather, the
pattern
of Sholai still lived, though of the individual components in this cycle—three greaters, two lessers, one receiver, two deepers, and an artificial—only the artificial was the same as the one that had recorded those original events in the Gr’tak system nearly four thousand years before.

By addressing its artificial, Sholai could relive that first arrival of the alien craft, second by second, as it had happened so long before.

It saw again the alien’s transformation as it unfolded, the smooth surface splitting along invisible seams, then everting in spiky arrays of probes and what was almost certainly weaponry. A pause, as though lightning-fast series of calculations were being made, and then the vessel split in half, the one ship becoming two, each a mirror image of the other. Traveling on slightly diverging vectors now, the two intruder vessels began slipping apart from one another. Sholai had boosted to maximum acceleration but had been unable to catch the intruder.

Hours later, one of the alien vessels began decelerating, killing its now fantastic velocity as it flashed down toward the world of Lakah’vnyu. Sholai could draw on the memories of other associatives to see that part of the story; it hurt, hurt with the deep wrench of traumatic dissociation, to see again that cloud-swirled crescent of oceans and mountains, plains and swamp, with enormous areas of its night side generating vast and roughly geometrical patterns of light. The probe seemed to take no notice of the Gr’tak city complexes… nor did it acknowledge the veritable cacophony of radio and laser-borne informational traffic.

Still decelerating, the probe flashed inward past the broad, circling belt of space communities orbiting Lakah’vnyu. Seconds later it struck the planet’s upper atmosphere, momentarily vanishing in a blaze of blue-white radiance, then arrowing down toward the nightside on a dazzling streamer of white flame. Explosion—a detonation brighter than the initial fireball—and now the probe descended not as one huge vessel but as a vast and unstoppable swarm of smaller craft.

The Gr’tak were a peaceful people, with a unified civilization built from the beginning as a cooperative multi-associative. They possessed formidable weaponry, but then-weapons were designed to shatter or deflect the comets and asteroids that periodically threatened their home world.

In any case, the Gr’tak had no experience with hostile strangers, not when their own polysymbiotic culture emphasized cooperation over competition. Aware, now, of the strangers’ arrival, their first thought was to attempt communication.

When their collectives began dying, disintegrating in savage blasts of fusion heat, they were quick enough to learn. By then, however, it was far too late.

The second probe, following its own course, missed Lakah’vnyu by a considerable margin. Still accelerating it plunged toward Doval and Tovan, the double stars that warmed the world of the Gr’tak. Minutes later, shedding heat from its outer hull by means of magnetic fields powerful enough to rival and even surpass those of a star, it hurtled deeper and deeper into Doval’s photosphere, vanishing in a shock wave lost against the sheer, raw fury of the sun’s radiance.

It was several of Lakah’vnyu’s rotational periods before the ship surfaced again, having completed its assigned operations deep within the star’s core. Lakah’vnyu’s primary was a twin star, both members white in color and fairly evenly matched in temperature and mass. The emergent vessel hung above the surface of Doval for a time, almost as though tasting the flow of protons comprising its photosphere… then moved to Tovan to vanish once again. By that time, the entire surface of Lakah’vnyu was locked in a deadly embrace with what were now clearly perceived as invaders. The Gr’tak knew of machine intelligence; indeed, most of the population utilized at least one artificial as a working part of each collective individual, and the concept of artificial intelligence was anything but foreign to them. The invader, however, appeared to be
all
machine, with no trace of its organic forebears. Shortly before it was eradicated in a savage fusion detonation, the Lakah’vnyud Cooperative of Sciences determined that the invader might well represent an intelligence so old that any organic component had been discarded ages before.

Fighting continued, but the fight was already a lost cause. The initial swarm of machines had embedded themselves in earth or sea, burrowing deep, applying fusion fires to transmute native rock into needed elements and metallic alloys, excreting bizarre and twisted shapes of metal alloy and polymer. Machines attacked by local forces, or even simply approached by Gr’tak representatives, were vigorously defended by further hordes of hunter-killer robots, jointed-legged things all glittering in shiny metallic casings, powered by pocket fusion plants and mounting powerful lasers and particle beams as weapons. The larger units, carefully protected, burrowed deeper and deeper into the planet’s crust, excavating vast caverns and filling them with gleaming machinery of increasing complexity.

Before long, more machines were appearing on the surface, larger and more powerful than those of the first wave. Nuclear detonations continued to wrack the surface of the world, obliterating Associative cities, but the invaders seemed immune to heat and radiation alike, stalking through the shattered, smoking rubble beneath black and flame-shot skies, burning down not only the fleeing Gr’tak, but all life, ruthlessly, indiscriminately, almost as though the invaders couldn’t tell the difference between an associative and a lesser.

The Gr’tak defense, such as it was, began crumbling. The first refugees were already streaming off-world, crowding into the orbital habitats, where anxious associatives were trying desperately to reconfigure themselves into new composites that might be able to provide workable responses to this sudden and devastating threat. Many colonies were already accelerating clear of the planet; no associative wanted to abandon Family… but in many cases life-support assets were already stretched perilously thin, and all cooperatives agreed that it would be better to save a few than to gamble for the lives of a few more… and risk losing all.

Five days after Sholai spotted the incoming Web probe, Doval exploded. The quick-gathering storm of radiation sleeting through the inner system was enough to convince those colonies that had elected to stay put to abandon their old orbits and begin accelerating at full drive.

More of the invader machines, meanwhile, were materializing on the outskirts of the system, raising terror among the crowded inhabitants of the now mobile colonies… though it appeared that they bothered with Gr’tak ships only when those ships attacked them first. The colonies were unarmed and did not seem to be on the invaders’ agenda. Whether that was because the invaders possessed some sense of morality or fair play, or because they were for the most part unconcerned with the Gr’tak save as a source of raw materials, was unknown.

The exploding sun grew brighter, and still brighter, as the world of the Gr’tak drowned in a sea of radiation. On the surface, the last of the defenders died as temperatures soared and seas boiled. The invaders continued their enigmatic building tasks among strangely shaped towers and unfathomable machinery. The planet’s atmosphere, flash-heated to incandescence, was stripped away, but the invaders were no more bothered by vacuum than by hard radiation.

Days later, Tovan exploded as well. By that time, though, all organic life on the surface of Lakah’vnyu had been extinguished, and the last of the mobile colonies, those that had not lingered so long that they’d been caught in the expanding shock wave of the nova, were now well beyond the limits of the system.