Symbionts (5 page)

Against the possibility that one or the other of the vessels might not survive the coming passage, full copies of both ships’ AI data stores were made and exchanged. Ever since leaving New America, Lieutenant Dagousset aboard the
Eagle
and the computer techs who’d transferred to the
Kasuga Maru
had been working with the freighter’s AI records, unlocking and analyzing previously sealed or coded data.

They’d struck gold with the
Kasuga Maru’s
capture—better, terbium, that rare lanthanide vital both in K-T drive systems and in certain types of AI circuitry. The freighter, it seemed, had been en route to New America not from Earth, but from the Imperial naval facility at Athena called Daikokukichi.

Her last assignment before that had been as part of a military convoy to the Alyan system.

That discovery had startled Dev and started a whirlwind of rumor and speculation within the crew.

Alya was the ancient Arabic name for the star variously listed in the star charts as Theta Serpentis or 63 Serpentis. A double star some 130 light-years from Sol, well beyond the outer fringes of the Shichiju. Alya B-V was the original DalRiss homeworld, called GhegnuRish; there, three years ago, while serving as a Hegemony striderjack with the Imperial Expeditionary Force, Dev had first made peaceful contact with the Xenophobe infesting that world. Alya A-VI—ShraRish—was a DalRiss colony world, the location of the only large DalRiss population since GhegnuRish had been abandoned to the Xeno, millennia before.

Kasuga Maru
had been carrying food and organic manufactory materials to the Imperial base on ShraRish. While in orbit there, her commo personnel had recorded a number of exchanges between the Imperial commander in orbit and the base on the surface. They’d been passed on to the Imperial station at Athena, but for some reason—the inefficiencies of the Imperial bureaucracy, perhaps—copies had remained in the freighter’s AI storage. As he scanned quickly through the decoded recordings, Dev knew that the Confederation Military Command was going to have to see them.

With the new course alignments complete,
Eagle
and the
Kasuga Maru
slipped back into the blue embrace of the K-T Plenum. The return to Herakles would take another thirty days.

Eagle’s
original crew of 310 had left her shorthanded to begin with by a factor of nearly twenty-five percent, and during the past month, a hundred of those had been told off as crews for the five cargo ships and merchants
Eagle
had captured in three star systems. Shorthanded meant long and frequent watches in the link modules, but it also meant more downtime spent jacked into
Eagle’s
recreational system. With a month to pass in K-T space, with no way to bleed off the excess heat that day by ship’s day grew more and more oppressive, recreational jacking was a necessity, not a luxury, and not mere entertainment. Without it heat, boredom, and the tedium of routine would have been intolerable.

Dev enjoyed his share of ViRdramas, of course, and lately he’d been downloading literary classics as part of a deliberate attempt to widen his own horizons. He liked ViRsex, too, though instead of solo electronic trysts with AI-generated partners or with the analogues of fellow Eagles, he had a good downloaded copy of Katya Alessandro’s analogue.

Lately, though, even ViRsex with Katya’s image had lost some of its original charm. The program, after all, relied to a large extent on his memories of Katya to make the analogue speak and act convincingly, and the more time he spent with the analogue instead of its flesh-and-blood original, the less spontaneous, the less
alive
the simulations seemed.

And there was something preying on his mind as well, a problem that had been growing since he’d left Herakles nearly four months earlier. Soon after
Eagle
dropped back into K-T space, then, Dev spent his off-watch downtime one ship’s evening loading one of the ship’s psych monitor programs.

The setting was a traditional Japanese room—tatami mats, a low table aglow in black lacquer, a viewall simulating a veranda overlooking an enclosed, Japanese garden. Fuji, snowcapped and perfect, rose gracefully above cherry trees beyond a stone wall, a print by Hokusai.
Eagle’s
monitor programs had been written for her original owners, back when she was still the
Tokitukaze,
and never been updated.

No matter.
Nihonjin
or
gaijin, shakai
or Frontier, people were still people.

“At last,” a voice said. “I was beginning to think that no one aboard this vessel cared to speak with me anymore.”

Dev turned to face the speaker, a small and gray-haired Japanese man, neatly and formally dressed in a traditional white
kariginu.
The image was that of Ieyasu Sutsumi, though that master of
Kokorodo,
the way of the mind, had had nothing to do with
Eagle’s
monitor programming. Sutsumi was a venerable figure; within
Nihonjin
culture, his age alone made him worthy of respect, and his reputation as both philosopher and teacher was widely known even among
gaijin,
especially among
gaijin
who’d had training with Hegemony military forces. Dev had particular reason to remember the man; the real Sutsumi had once sat on a military review board over him, recommending that he be assigned to the leg infantry instead of warstriders because of a bout of technophobia.

“Konichiwa, Sensei,”
Dev said, bowing formally. The program would neither care nor react if he ignored the amenities, but observing the formalities made Dev feel more at ease. “I imagine most of the crew feels uncomfortable using a monitor programmed by the enemy.”

One part of himself noted that it was silly apologizing for human behavior to an AI program, as though it felt hurt, lonely, or ignored. Another part acknowledged that it was just as silly for the program to act as though it had missed having conversations with
Eagle’s
crew, since the program was self-aware, within the definition of artificial intelligence, only when it was running. Still, the value of such interactive software lay in the pretense that it, too, was a human being, as capable of emotion as Dev.

The image folded its legs beneath it in a graceful descent to a
tatami.
“And you do not?”

Dev lowered himself to a mat opposite the table. “Not really,
Sensei.
I don’t hate the Japanese. I hate the government, what it’s become.”

“ ‘Hate’ is a strong word, Devsan, and trivialized by misuse. I doubt that many of your compatriots aboard hate anyone in more than an abstract way. I suspect that the reason you are different from them lies in your choice of birthworlds, rather than in your choice of enemies.”

That, Dev reflected, was true enough. Born and raised on Earth, in an outlying enclave of the BosWash metroplex sprawl, he’d grown up in the ever-present shadow of Japanese culture and technology. Though he’d never been part of the
shakai,
Earth’s dominant, elitist culture, it had been impossible to escape the distinctive reliance on advanced technology displayed by so many of the planet’s citizens. There, even members of the
Fukushi,
the Imperial welfare program that provided free housing, food, and other services to perhaps two-thirds of the population, possessed the Level One, single-socket implants that let them interact with technic society… and receive government-sponsored information and entertainment downloads. It was much the same on the other Core Worlds, where the populations had enjoyed the status quo of Imperial-Hegemony rule for centuries.

Among the worlds of the Frontier, however, the emphasis was on people, not machines. There was more variety within the populations, too, as well as a stubborn, independent streak that cared less for fashion than for practicality. A person was more likely to work his own problems out than to rely on the help of an AI monitor program.

“So. Why are you here?” Sutsumi’s image asked.

Dev took a breath before answering. The illusion of reality was perfect in every way; the breath steadied him, stilled some part of the doubt and fear that had brought him here, exactly as though it had been a real breath drawn by his flesh-and-blood body.

“Sensei.
I need a check on my TM rating. I… When we took the
Kasuga Maru,
I felt like I was close to the edge. Again.” He ran one hand through his hair. Again, the illusion was perfect. He felt the ceramic slickness of his right temporal socket beneath his fingertips.

“Ah.” Sutsumi’s eyes narrowed, as though he were studying Dev closely. “Let me have a closer look.”

Inwardly, Dev sensed the flux and tickle of circuits opening and closing, of personal RAM being sampled, of neurons firing. Within the space of two heartbeats, he felt cold, then hot, smelled cinnamon, tasted salt, heard the tinkling echo of crystal bells. For the briefest of instants he was a warstrider, two-meter duralloy legs scissoring across a landscape of battle-torn earth and shattered buildings. Power thrilled.…

“We would need a high-level diagnostic for a full-confidence reading, of course,” Sutsumi said. “But a quick reading of your psych index gives a TM of point four. That is normal for you, Devsan,
neh?”

“Normal for me.Yeah.”

The development of cephlink technology had brought its own zoo of ills and mental conditions, from people with physiologies that simply could not tolerate chips and circuits grown within their brains, to those who rejected them on esthetic, political, or religious grounds. Dozens of psychotechnic disorders, mental problems triggered by link technology, had been identified. Three—technic depression, technophobia, and technomegalomania—were so prevalent that everyone with link hardware was given a rating on a decimal scale of zero to one indicating his or her susceptibility to PTDs.

As with a drug, the effects of TM, technomegalomania, could be obvious or subtle. It could make a linked person euphoric, or it could act like a depressant when he was not linked. For some, the feelings of godlike power when they were linked to an AI or to link-driven equipment or simply while they experienced the illusion of ViReality could be overwhelming.

For some professions—jacking a military warstrider, for instance—a high TM rating was not a handicap. For piloting a starship, however, where a lapse in judgment could wreck the vessel and kill the entire crew, feelings of godlike power were not thought of as valuable assets. Riding the currents of the K-T Plenum, a starship was balanced in a tiny, self-generated pocket universe, adrift on the interface between normal fourspace and the quantum sea. Modern cosmology viewed the entire physical universe as no more than a four-dimensional bubble floating atop a polydimensional ocean of energy, the godsea. A mistake in judgment while riding the godsea currents, and
Eagle’s
eighty-four-thousand-ton mass would be transformed instantly into energy; against such furies as those a starship rode, the mass-to-energy translation would yield not even a flicker of incandescence.

For that reason, the Hegemony Navy, as Dev had ample personal reason to remember, did not admit people with TM ratings higher than point two. They wanted calm and dispassionate jackers with sound judgment who could make reasoned decisions under pressure. The independent merchant lines—and organizations as desperate for experienced shipjackers as the Confederation Navy—were not nearly so picky, how-ever.

Dev Cameron, son of a starship captain, had yearned to be a shipjacker himself for as long as he could remember. He’d jacked aboard a freighter for a time, but when he’d tried joining the Hegemony Navy nearly four years ago, his TM rating of point four had blocked him. He’d ended up as leg infantry, then as a warstrider.

The war and the rebel Confederation’s need for ships and men who could jack them had given him another chance, though, and after leading the warstrider assault team that had captured the
Tokitukaze,
he’d found his lifelong dream of commanding a starship to have become reality.

He still had that point four TM rating, though, and every time he jacked into
Eagle’s
command link he felt that familiar-yet-new thrill coursing through his being, a kind of head-spinning glory that came with riding the godsea, with tricking the cosmos into doing his bidding. Worse, he felt the same thrill during combat, a surging, exultant, and terrifying sense of invincibility.

So far, he’d held those feelings rigidly in check, mostly by clinging to the realization of just how many lives depended on his rational assessment of things both within the K-T Plenum and in combat. But things had happened to him within the past few months that had pushed him beyond the limits he’d set for his own emotions.

There were medtechs aboard the
Eagle,
and even several human psychotechnicians, but he didn’t want anyone to know what was going on within his own thoughts and perceptions and memory just now. He didn’t want to look closely at them himself, either, though he knew that if he didn’t, things would only get worse until he made a bad and possibly fatal mistake. That was why he’d sought out the anonymous comfort of the ship’s AI psych monitor. The record of what went on here was private, accessible only by his personal RAM codes or by those authorized by a military court.

He was glad of that confidentiality. Dev didn’t want anybody to know just how scared he was.

“You have had some rather strange experiences recently,” the Sutsumi analogue said.

Dev started, looked up. His thoughts had been wandering. “Huh?”

“You had an unusual encounter,” the analogue said. “And I have the feeling that it is at least partly responsible for this atypical lack of confidence in yourself. Perhaps you’d like to discuss what happened.”

“Um. You mean the Heraklean Xenophobe.” He shrugged. “The word ‘like’ isn’t exactly applicable. But I guess I have to.”

“You don’t
have
to do anything, Devsan. But if it would make you feel better…”