Symbionts (6 page)

Dev smiled ruefully. Once, years ago, he’d downloaded a history of the development of artificial intelligence. One of the earliest experiments in that high-tech realm had been an interactive program called “Liza” that simulated the give and take between a psychiatrist and a patient. “My father doesn’t like me.” “Why do you say your father doesn’t like you?” The conversations, such as they were, had depended on the program’s use of key words that it fed back to the patient in questions designed to elicit more statements. The program had not been self-aware, not even in the limited fashion that
Eagle’s
monitor program was self-aware, and by modern standards the psychiatric practices it had emulated were scarcely a step removed from arrant superstition.

Still, people who’d interacted with Liza had reported feeling much better after discussing their problems with it. Dev suspected that the Sutsumi analogue was pushing him in the same direction. “A problem shared,” ran the old saying, “is a problem halved.”

“On Herakles,” Dev told the
sensei,
“I, uh, linked with a Xenophobe. With a Naga, I mean.” He still wasn’t used to the new name for the alien intelligences. “I’d communicated with two other Nagas before, one out in the Alyan system, one on Eridu, but this was something… very different.”

Sutsumi waited patiently, listening, legs folded on the
tatami.

“We still don’t know what happened, really,” he went on. “Not the medtechs, not Confederation Military Command. Not even me, and I was there. Somehow, that Xeno and I joined so completely that we really were a new… entity.”
Xenolink,
the AI and medical experts were calling that blending of human and Naga.

“Symbiosis,” Sutsumi suggested. “Two organisms functioning together in a way complementary to both.”

“Maybe. While I was linked to the thing, I could see and feel with its senses, while it could see and hear with mine. Xenos don’t have sight or hearing, you know, though they have plenty of senses that we don’t. They can taste magnetism in rock. Feel electrons moving like sand trickling through your fingers. I felt all of that, though I still don’t understand it any more than a blind man understands blue. And I had access to… its past. Its memories.” He shuddered. “They’re still with me, though I’m damned if I can make much of anything out of them.”

“You were thoroughly checked out afterward by medtechs and somatic specialists, were you not?”

“Sensei,
you don’t know the half of it. Though I’m still not sure whether anybody believes my story. Hell, I’m not sure I do. But it doesn’t matter. While I was plugged into the Naga, an Imperial squadron attacked. They surprised us, came out of K-T space so close to the planet we were caught in the open, naked, almost defenseless. They
had
us,
Sensei.
But I… I stopped them.”

“How did you stop them, Devsan?”

“By throwing rocks. I knocked them out of orbit by throwing rocks.”

Sutsumi’s image blinked once at that, and Dev smiled. Long before Man had first left his homeworld there’d been speculation about using asteroids nudged out of orbit or material scooped from the surface of the moon as weapons literally unstoppable if dropped toward a world’s surface from the top of its gravity well.

At Herakles, though, the fusion of Dev and Naga had reversed that equation. By generating intense, swiftly moving magnetic fields, he/they had plucked one-ton masses of iron and Rogan-Process building material from the facing of an atmosphere generator and hurled them into space at one-tenth of the speed of light. Imperial warships caught by that barrage, even one of the monster Ryu-class carriers, had been vaporized, like gnats touched by the breath of a laser cutting torch.

Either the monitor program had been following his thoughts or it had just accessed records of the battle at Herakles.
“
The transitional kinetic energy released by the impact of a one-ton mass moving at ten percent c,” Sutsumi said, “is approximately 10
¹⁹
joules. The equivalent of thousands of high-yield thermo-nuclear explosions. How did you feel, wielding such power?”

Dev closed his eyes, but in his memory he saw again the cloud-wracked sky, sensed the Imperial ships overhead.
Lightnings fork from the crest of an artificial mountain. Thunder peals.
He exerted himself
so.… Overhead, the sky turns white, an illumination more dazzling than the brassy, subgiant’s glare of the Heraklean sun. Another ship dies.…

“I don’t think I’ll ever be free of the… feeling,” Dev said. “I think it changed me. Like I can never go back to what I was.”

“But you did. You broke your link with the Naga.”

“Yes.” He’d had to. He’d been terrified of losing his humanity. Sometimes he wondered if he was still entirely human. There were times…

Lightning flared. Behind… beneath him, the Naga’s mind was a murmuring sea, voices, dream-memories, and above all, the power of a storm-torn sea.…

Later, when the Naga was gone, there was such… loneliness.

“I’ve been worried,
Sensei,”
he told the analogue. “Especially when I’m linked, in combat, or while jacking a starship. I’m afraid of taking chances that just can’t be justified. Of losing… control.”

“Give me a specific example.”

“Okay. At New America, when we took
Kasuga Maru.
I decided to gamble, to play the part of a Juanyekundan shipjacker to scare the enemy into surrender.”

“The ploy worked.”

“Yes. Yes, it did. Then I went on and bluffed the skipper of the
Kasuga Maru.”

“Bluff and deception are important aspects of successful military tactics.”

“Sure, but don’t you see? I wasn’t even thinking about the possibility of failure. If the bluffs had failed, well, I’m afraid I was ready to push ahead anyway. Even though that could have meant
Eagle
was destroyed. It’s like a storm inside my brain when I link in and I’m riding the percentages. Like the burn of a jolt addict.”

There were people who used their cephlinks to commit suicide, intentionally or accidentally, by channeling electronic stimulation directly into the pleasure centers of their brains. PC stimulation—whether through hardwired implants or injections of programmed nano—could destroy a person in months, even in days if he had unlimited access to the technology and lacked the power of will to resist its siren’s call. Most victims died of thirst, so powerful were the cravings for the better-that-orgasms that went on and on and on. Some tried to stop short of death and found they could no longer live without it—jolt addicts and brain burners.

“I doubt that you can imagine what such an addiction is like,” Sutsumi said. “Certainly you want to experience the feeling of power again. But you control that desire.”

“Maybe.So far, maybe. Sometimes I wonder if I’m losing it.”

“Tell me, Devsan. Do you wish to repeat the experience with the Naga?”

Lightning! A bolt of raw light, radiating far into the ultra-violet, as mass shredded air, hurtling skyward…

“Huh? No way! Believe me, I thought about it and no. I didn’t want to be a god, throwing mountains and knowing I could kill those people in orbit just by flexing my will, no. But I’m afraid that what I felt then is, well, spilling into what I feel when I jack a starship. Or take people into combat.” He held his hands before him, then slowly flexed them into twin fists. “My God, the
power…
”

Sutsumi’s image was silent for a long time, and Dev wondered what was going on. An AI program could “think,” if that was the right word, far faster than any human, considering thousands, even millions of possibilities in fractions of a second. The delay might be meant to reassure Dev that his problem was receiving careful consideration.

But more likely, the problem had no solution. Like any other citizen of the Frontier, Dev was going to have to come to grips with it himself, without help from a programmed analogue.

“Devsan,” the image said at last, “all I can tell you is that the fact that you are concerned enough to bring this to me suggests that you have not lost a proper perspective. If you insisted that there was nothing to worry about, that you had been untouched by your experiences, well…” The old eyes twinkled in a passable simulation of humor.
“Then
I would worry!”

“Maybe,” Dev said. He was unconvinced.
Lightning against a blackening sky; peals of thunder, like battle cries of the gods.
“I wish I could forget what happened on Herakles, though.”

“Why?”

“Because I have the damnedest feeling that, well, that the only way I can become complete is to merge with one of those things again and…” He shuddered, trying to shut out the memories. “I don’t want to do it again, to lose myself that way. At the same time, I find myself wanting it,
needing
it.

“I’m wondering,
Sensei,
if I’m addicted, somehow, to the Xenolink.”

Chapter 4

4. Armor

a. The primary mission of armor units is the attacking of infantry and artillery. The enemy’s rear is the happy hunting ground for armor. Use every means to get it there.…

—
Letter of Instruction

General George S. Patton, Jr.

C.E.
3 April 1944

Tucked in beneath the overhang of the VK-141 Stormwind, Colonel Katya Alessandro could neither move nor deploy the hull sensors of her warstrider. She was linked, however, with Major Benjis Nadry, the Stormwind’s pilot, and she could see, as he could, the torn and convoluted landscape blurring past the combat carrier’s belly scant meters below.

The ascraft was flying NOE, nape-of-the-earth, following a path worked out hours before through careful examination of 3-D radar holographs relayed by satellite. Their assigned drop zone glowed against her view forward, marked by a green square shimmering near the crest of a shell-blasted slope designated Hill 232.

“DZ in sight,” Katya said, her words relayed through the air/spacecraft’s intercom to the other three warstriders suspended from the carrier’s external riderslots. “Thirty-second warning.”

“Copy that, Assassin Leader,” Captain Frank Kilroy replied.

“Assassin Three copies,” Lieutenant Virginia Halliwell added.

“And Four copies. Let’s kick ass!” That was Lieutenant Hari Sebree.

She could sense the other three warstriders, armored, multiton monsters cradled in their riderslots beneath the stubby, anhedral wings of the ascraft, voices and the steady pulse of data feeds over hard-jacked interfaces. Katya shifted her visual display to a view aft. A second Stormwind followed in the wake of the first, a hundred meters back and so low the wind of its passage kicked dust from the hilltops and set the scrub brush to thrashing. Each Stormwind carried one element—four warstriders; Katya was descending on what should be the enemy’s main artillery reserve with eight machines, a full squad. She’d have been happier with a sixteen-strider platoon at least, but there hadn’t been time to scavenge more from a hard-pressed and rapidly thinning front line. She wished, too, that she could talk with Major Vic Hagan, the CO of the second element, but the assault platoon was observing strict communications silence.

“Ready for drop, Colonel,” Nadry announced. “I’m picking up heavy H-band radar. Somebody just got curious.”

“I see it,” Katya replied. Alerts flickered across the bottom of her visual field, warning of a weapons lock, probably for a battery of strider-mounted missiles. “Kurt? What do you make of it?”

Warrant Tech Officer Kurt Allen, one of two men crammed into her Warlord with her, was already scanning the radar traces, searching for a point source.

“I’ve got a dozen different transmitters, Colonel,” he replied, his voice as calm and steady as always. “Probably remotes, set up so we don’t get an active lock on the launch platforms.”

“No problem,” Sublieutenant Ryan Green, her pilot, said. “We’ll spot ’em when they launch!”

A green light flashed in her display. “Five seconds!” Nadry announced. “Cutting internal feeds!”

Power and sensor feeds from the ascraft switched off, and Katya’s view of the outside world was replaced by a claustrophobic half darkness: duralloy armor and a tiny wedge of moving ground beneath her feet. Display feeds and alerts glowed balefully at the periphery of her vision. “You’ve got the legs, Ryan,” she told the pilot.

“Rog!” His mental voice was high-pitched, taut with excitement. “Jets hot!”

Abruptly, the Stormwind went nose high, bellying toward the hill at a point just below its crest. Air roared through the ascraft’s intakes; fusion-heated plasma shrieked from directional, ball-pivot Venturis directed forward and down, blasting at rock and sand in swirling, superheated clouds.

Ten meters above the slope, Katya gave a mental command. Magnetic grapples released their hold on her warstrider, and she fell from the ascraft’s riderslot, a clean drop. The ground rushed up at her, and then the jump pack strapped to her Warlord jolted her with the savage kick of twin jets slamming upward against almost sixty tons of falling mass.

Contact!
She hit gravel and dirt with a savage jar, the flanged feet of her RS-64GC Warlord gouging into the ground before whining gyros helped her recapture a precarious balance. Since Green had the Warlord’s legs—meaning control of its movement—Katya simply watched as the combat machine unfolded itself into combat mode, the sharply angled, digitigrade legs taking the weight of the fuselage with the high-pitched whine of servos. The strider lurched as the left foot slipped in soft earth, then steadied itself. Nanoflage layers on the outer hull lightened to a pale, mottled tan in response to the brightly lit surroundings. The machine’s name, painted on either side of the blunt, heavily armored snout, was
Assassin’s Blade.

Katya scanned the surroundings on broadband receptors. Ten meters away, Kilroy’s KR-9 Manta dropped from the sky on jets of flaring plasma, landing with a crash as better than forty tons impacted on the hill. Overhead, the ascraft continued to drift upslope, spilling two more combat machines as it moved. Halliwell’s Ghostrider and Sebree’s Scoutstrider fell clear, triggered their jump packs, and slammed into the hillside.