Rebellion (19 page)

—
Intelligence in the Universe

Dr. Paul Hernandez

C.E.
2532

There was Self, and the myriad extensions of Self that intertwined through the sheltering warmth of Mother Rock like the lacy twistings of veins of metal ore. As always, Self dreaded the parting, the tiny death of separation of Self from Self that was necessary as an extension of Self into the surrounding unconsciousness of not-Self. It was precisely like the amputation of a limb as several hundred of the component cells of one slim pseudopod of Self nestled within the Self-manufactured prosthesis of a rock threader and, cell by pain-wracked cell, severed each link with the main body.

White agony… and loss…

For both of the two sundered aspects of Self there was diminution. For the main body, resting within the cavernous, interconnected voids of not-Rock deep within the depths of Mother Rock, the loss was slight. The Self-mass was continually fissioning off bits of itself and sending them off like exploratory probes, independent bearers of tiny, micro-Selves that wormed out through the surrounding rock as messengers of intelligence and self-awareness. Usually they returned. Sometimes they did not.

For those slivers of awareness, however, amoebic, organic-inorganic composites of awareness, the loss was catastrophic. Perhaps half of those micro-Selves could not endure the transition, the shattering loss of identity, of memory, of ego that was part of the golden warmth of Unity. Sealed within the sleek, artificial body of the rock threader, the fragment of diminished Self struggled to come to grips with its truncated scope and being, »self« now, instead of Self.

Shrunken, isolated, »self« could remember snatches of its former life as Self, but dimly, as splintered dream-memories. Awareness once had been the shifting and blended thoughts and perceptions of trillions of tightly organized, interconnected units; now its awareness encompassed the being of a few thousand units only. So much had been lost! For long moments, the Self within the artificial body of the rock threader shuddered, writhed, and very nearly went mad.

It was a madness of loss and of something that might translate roughly as grief.

Of what remained of »self’s« awareness, strongest was the need to quest out from the parent body, a drive hardwired both into the complex molecular rings analogous to chromosomes within each unit’s organic material, and within the molecule-sized computers adrift within its inner, cytoplasmic seas. That need granted »self« a measure of control, gave it purpose and a means of filling the yawning chasm of loss and need howling behind »self’s« brutally amputated mind.

Gradually, madness subsided, though it remained as a churning subset of rigidly controlled need, boiling constantly just beneath the highest levels of »self’s« thoughts. The rock threader, a slender and inorganic extrusion grown from Self’s body, became a kind of mobile exoskeleton for the oozing mass of »self’s« gelatinous units. Magnetic fields flicked on, shifted, and grew in power. As »self’s« perceptions reached out in the surrounding Rock, the threader began moving.

There was Rock, and there was »self«
,
the former parting for the latter in the powerful magnetic flux that turned it plastic. The rock threader followed the track of another »self« that had passed this way before, a »self« that for reasons unknown had never returned to Self for reabsorption and a sharing of new perceptions and memories. »Self« followed the old track partly because the rock, once deformed by another threader’s passage, was softer and more yielding there; it followed, too, in a dimly perceived quest for that lost fragment of the vaster Self.

Threats, both to »self« and to Self, had to be found and absorbed if Self was to continue its age-old expansion through the comfortingwarmth of Mother Rock.

The old track led upward, away from the sustaining heat of Mother Rock. Ahead, dimly sensed now, »self« could taste the magnetic savor of pure metals and other less-identifiable substances in seemingly boundless concentrations. Closer at hand, in every direction, in fact, it could sense the energy flux and movement of other »selves«, all climbing through the yielding Rock away from the comfort of Self, closing on a treasure trove promising boundless raw materials, growth and survival.

»Self’s« pace through the rock increased.

Chapter 15

Everything we know about Xenophobe psychology comes from the testimony of those few of us who actually made physical contact with them. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to tell how much of the story has been filtered by our human prejudices and opinions.

—from a report given before the

Hegemony Council on Space Exploration

Devis Cameron

C.E.
2542

Twenty-eight kilometers west of Babel, a kilometer-wide crater marked the site of the last Xenophobe breakthrough. There, the jungle pressed close around the scar of that last battle, overlooked by a modest, thick-forested slope called Henson’s Rise. The crater itself had been tagged Site Red One.

Hegemony Military Command, with the experience won on twelve other worlds infested by the Xenophobe invaders, had erected defensive barriers against the possibility of a second breakthrough at this place. Shortly after that first encounter, walls more massive than those of any Terran castle had been grown in place; earth and dead vegetation had been poured into hastily erected plastic molds, then seeded with self-replicating nanits that had transformed rubble into solid rock, a treatment known as the Rogan Process.

The improvised fortifications overlooked the crater rim, ringing it in completely with ten-meter RoPro walls and brooding gray towers, each capped by a robot gun emplacement. The automatic defenses were backed up by troops, both Hegemony warstriders from the 3rd New American Mech Cav and leggers of the Eridu 1st Home Guard Militia.

Less than an hour after sunrise, the assault was heralded first by an earthquake that caused the nearest trees to shiver. Mud fountained into the air as the ground split wide. Seconds later, a dense, milk-white fog began issuing from the gaping fissures, spreading across the crater floor to create a white, circular lake almost a kilometer across, a pool of heavier-than-air gas far thicker than any morning mist but too thin to be properly called a liquid. As it pressed relentlessly against the crater’s inside rim, sampling robots planted there tasted the gas and transmitted their findings seconds before they died; the fog consisted of trillions of molecule-sized machines, nanodisassemblers, each carrying a few atoms of what once had been solid rock.

Then a sudden magnetic flux at the crater’s center hurled shattered stone and gravel into the sky, and the thread-slender, questing tip of the lead Xenophobe slithered into view, weaving above the surface of the white fog sea.

Xenophobes, when they traveled underground, usually followed the Subsurface Deformation Tracks of other Xenos that had passed that way before, as though the SDTs were underground highways running through solid rock. That preference was one of the few ways in which the alien machine/creatures were predictable, and it had given the Red One defenders some warning. They’d been listening to the growing subsurface sounds—the creaks, snaps, and groans of bending rock—for days now, and were already at full alert. When the actual breakthrough began, they’d been prepared—or at least, so they’d thought.

It was the sheer savagery of the attack that caught them by surprise, as one Xeno after another boiled from the tortured ground, streaming white fog, turning the area deadly with the disintegrating touch of drifting nano-D clouds. Turret-mounted plasma guns and lasers had crisscrossed the crater’s bowl with searing flame, shells laden with anti-nano-D counter-measures had been pumped into the fog by rapid-firing autocannons, but the Xenophobe Alphas had smashed clear of the geysering earth and snaked their way toward the crater rim like twenty-meter serpents, breasting the white fog like eldritch sea serpents with writhing whips for heads.

Several of the monsters died in the crater, sliced to bits by the withering. AI-directed fire or the bolts of light from warstriders posted along the defensive wall. Others, however, began transforming, their snakelike forms blurring and melting, their quicksilver bodies collapsing into new, more compact shapes. Most common were things like terrestrial sea urchins, flattened spheres two meters across with slender spines reaching five meters beyond that. Embedded in crackling auras of electromagnetic force, they floated on Eridu’s magnetic field. The maglev effect did not render them weightless, quite, but they drifted along lightly enough that their rippling spines snapping against the ground or the wind itself could waft them toward the nearest human defenses more quickly than any warstrider’s pace.

Two of the drifting monsters died in the high-energy crossfire from the surrounding towers, but eight more serpents surfaced in the meantime, and the fog sea was rising now, spilling across the crater rim and lapping against the inner base of the RoPro fortifications themselves. Counters recorded dizzying concentrations of nano-D in the atmosphere; the walls were softening under the assault of submicroscopic weapons that pulled them apart in the same way that they’d been assembled, a molecule at a time. Foundations weakened and walls cracked; a gun tower settled slightly, tilting ominously inward toward the white sea as foot soldiers manning its ramparts scrambled for safety.

Five minutes after the breakthrough had begun, reinforcements arrived at the scene, a dozen circling ascraft with ground support weapons, and a pair of VK-141 Stormwinds, each carrying four Mech Cav warstriders in external hull slots. With shrieking jets, the Stormwinds set down in a jungle clearing east of the crater amid swirling clouds of dust and uprooted vegetation. The striders had unhooked and swung into action, loping toward the Red One fortifications just as the first tower crumbled into the pit in an explosion of RoPro fragments and debris.

The nano-fog spilled through the gap in the wall like a flood gushing through a broken dam. Monsters followed, black or silver or dull pearl-gray nightmares of lashing spines and twisting, medusoid tentacles, Xenophobe Alphas that fought by using powerful magnetic fields to hurl BB-sized fragments of themselves at hypersonic speeds, or killed with the deadly embrace of a tentacle laden with nanodisassemblers. A Mech Cav RS-64 Warlord opened fire with thundering, left-right-left blasts from its charged particle guns; forked lightnings played across the leading Xeno horror, then shattered it into fragments.

Horribly, those fragments kept moving, as though the Xeno machines were themselves alive and
continued
to live even when they’d been smashed into smoking pieces. The fragments, dubbed Gammas by the humans who fought them, some no more than a meter across, hunched and wriggled themselves across the battlefield, each steaming with the release of trillions of deadly nano-D units from their writhing surfaces that steadily ate away at whatever they touched. The nano count hit point four-eight and climbed steadily. The circling ascraft accounted for two more Alphas, but the rising nano count soon forced them back, their air surfaces and intake fans already corroding in the deadly, invisible cloud of nano-D drifting above the battleground.

Tensions were still high between the local militia troopers and the Hegemony forces, but politics were forgotten as combat was joined at point-blank range. Legger militiamen fought in the shadows of Hegemony warstriders, turning hand flamers and lasers on the carpet of crawling fragments. AND rounds burst overhead, bathing the area in anti-nano-D clouds to combat the disintegrating effect of the Xeno fog. For six long minutes, the issue was in doubt, as warstriders smashed down the Xeno Alphas and foot soldiers mopped up the Gammas with blasts of flame and radiation.

Then a fresh wave of Xenos emerged from the tunnel entrance, smashing down a fifty-meter stretch of RoPro wall and spilling onto the seared battleground east of the crater. The nano-D count reached point six-five, high enough to gnaw through the armor of the legger infantry in ten minutes or less. At a command, the troops fell back, covered by their huge, cephlinked comrades-at-arms. The warstriders fought on until Gammas began clinging to their legs and foot assemblies, eating through durasheath armor like acid through paper. For a time, the strider warriors cleansed one another in brief, hissing blasts of flame, but soon there were just too many of the creeping horrors, armor panels were failing, internal mechanisms corroding. Unable to battle so many at once, the striders began to retreat. A second line of defensive fortifications was being erected five kilometers to the east, between Red One and Babel.

The fight to save Babel and Eridu’s space elevator would continue there.

»Self« had emerged from the rock suddenly, to find itself in the midst of a searing storm of energies unlike anything it had ever before encountered. The environment was bizarrely alien, a near-vacuum of not-Rock, a gulf that »self’s« senses strained to bridge and measure… and failed. Other »selves« were nearby; »self« could hear their calls across the low-energy end of the electromagnetic spectrum and sense that they’d been attacked by some unseen, terribly destructive threat.

Without conscious volition, threat triggered response, a shifting of body surface from rock threader to defender.

The transformation to the defender form was not an ability native to the original evolution of Self, but something adopted in the distant past from contact with another species, a not-Self intelligence that had manipulated matter in much the same way that Self manipulated Rock. The trait was now part of »self’s« gene-analogues, an inborn conditioning transmitted through each reproductive cycle, the response virtually automatic each time a »self« emerged from the protection of Mother Rock into the Void at the heart of the universe.