Jackers (11 page)

There would be no further challenge of that authority, not after 26 Draconis was brought back into the Hegemony’s fold.

Jefferson was dissolving into chaos. Though the government’s first impulse had been to withhold from the public the news that an Imperial fleet was in-system, word had leaked out within minutes through a hundred separate sources. Now, mobs of people filled the parks and walkways between Jefferson’s archaic glass towers, like brightly colored rivers lapping between blue and silver cliffs. A giant towered above them; a five-story display screen raised along the side of the Weiler Building overlooking Franklin Park was replaying Duane Lassiter’s announcement of the fleet’s arrival. As Katya crossed the park, the image of the Eostran delegate seemed to be speaking directly to her, even though she couldn’t hear the words. For that, you needed a newslink feed pressed against your palm interface, or, if you had T-sockets, a ViRcom plugged in and tuned to the appropriate channel. Half of the city’s population, Katya estimated, must be ’faced in by now, as the world’s news services downloaded megabytes of news, sound, picture, and virtual reality, to the panicky crowds.

Katya was amused, in a sour way, that the news services, which had taken surprisingly little interest in the proceedings in the Hall of Congress during the past weeks, had been out in force since Lassiter’s announcement. Reporters and sensors for all the major ViRnews downloaders had invaded the former Sony Building, seeking sensory downloads from anyone who’d had anything to do with the proceedings in the Hall of Congress, but most especially with General Sinclair.

He’d told Katya what he wanted her to do—she’d had troubles of her own getting past the media’s sensorecorders—then slipped out with a small retinue through the building’s sublevel flitter parking garage. His destination was the command center in the mountains to the northwest; Katya would complete her assignment here for him, then join her unit at Port Jefferson.

Overhead, an incoming ascraft scratched a white contrail across the sky. They were already starting to abandon New America’s orbital station—the military personnel assigned there, at any rate. There were far too many civilians aboard to evacuate them all before the Japanese fleet arrived. The only hope was to abandon the station to them without a fight and hope the Imperial authorities simply occupied it rather than choosing to make some sort of example of its several thousand inhabitants.

No, Highport’s population should be safe enough. If the Imperials wanted to create an object lesson, they would find the educational material for that lesson here, on the ground.

The giant was still silently gesturing at her, but she escaped his scrutiny when she descended an escalator into a fabricrete cavern, an entrance to Jefferson’s subsurface maglev network. She didn’t follow the holographic arrows or the nervous crowds of people toward the train boarding tubes, however, but turned instead down a side passageway. After threading her way through a tangle of bare runnels dripping with condensation, she palmed an ID access interface that took her past two New American militia guards in combat armor and through a massive door marked “Authorized Personnel Only.”

The underground complex was one of several Confederation strong points in the city. “Good afternoon, Colonel.” A final checkpoint blocked her way, three men in armor, one with a bulky squad support plasma gun.

“Hello, Captain Adyebo,” Katya said, offering her hand for another interface. As a security AI probed her personal RAM through her palm circuitry, a life-size holo of her own head and shoulders materialized in the air, slowly turning.

“So, what’s the word?” Katya asked. “Am I me?”

Adyebo’s teeth flashed white against his dark face as he accessed her ID. “Looks like, Colonel. What can we do for you?”

“I just need to check on Fred,” she said. “Then I’ll be making arrangements to move him.”

“Very good. I’d hate to think of the Impies getting hold of him.” The nano of the door blurred to transparency, then dispersed. “Go on through.”

Inside an otherwise empty storeroom, an egg-shaped travel pod rested in a cradle, illuminated by overhead fluorescents. Approaching the pod, Katya reached out with her left hand, palming a small touchplate in the slick, nangineered metal. With a thought, relayed through her cephlink and the circuitry in her hand, she transmitted a code to the simpleminded electronics of the egg. Part of that golden surface rippled like water, then dilated open.

Black motion glistened within, catching the overhead lights with shimmering, prismatic glistenings, like rainbows on a puddle of oil. With a mingling of awe and fear, Katya stared into the writhing substance of what had been, until very recently, Mankind’s deadly and implacable enemy.

Xenophobes.

“Not Xenophobes,” Katya reminded herself aloud. Xenophobe, of course, was a human name for an entity that had no label for itself other than a concept that seemed to translate as “Self.” Now that peaceful communications had finally been established with at least two of the strange, corporate beings, a new name had been coined for them to avoid the biases of fear and bloodstained mistrust that still clung to the old.

“Naga,” the name of a race of wise, benevolent, and nonviolent serpent deities in Hindu mythology, seemed apt. Xenophobe war machines were huge, serpentine bioconstructs, classified by type and named after poisonous Terran reptiles. Hostile colonies were still called Xenos, but with this Naga’s help, perhaps the Confederation would be able to win more of the vast, dark beings into an alliance unlike any before known to Man.

It would be a while before she could easily think of these things as anything other than “Xenophobes,” however. Mastering an unsteady queasiness at the sight, Katya leaned against the cool, nangineered slickness of the travel pod next to the opening and peered inside.

The… creature?creatures?… within moved with a liquid, slithering sound. The travel pod contained only a tiny fragment of the Eridu Naga, about one ton of the original creature’s mass, budded from the parent and brought here to New America, months ago. Because the bud contained patterns of data stored by the parent, Confederation xenobiologists had suggested that it might be possible to use this fragment to communicate with other, still-hostile Xenophobes.

It was an exciting idea, one with great promise.

Assuming “Fred,” as his human attendants called him, didn’t fall into Imperial hands in the meantime.

Despite his nickname, Katya still couldn’t look at the entity without a twinge of revulsion. Each individual unit, or
cell
looked like nothing so much as a lump of tar or grease adrift in a black and viscous liquid, slug-shaped, the size of a man’s head and massing perhaps a kilogram or so. Filaments twisted within the liquid, joining each cell to its neighbors in an alien analogue of human neurons and dendrites. Individually, the Xeno units were no more intelligent than the electronics in Katya’s cephlink, responding to outside stimuli with all the insight and rationality of a flatworm. Together, however, they formed a colony creature with an intelligence that was almost certainly far greater than human.

Any uncertainty in that classification was due not to doubt about the being’s intelligence, but to its sheer
difference.
Xenos didn’t think like humans. With group-memories spanning millennia, possessing a bewildering array of alien senses but lacking both sight and hearing, and with a worldview of the universe literally inside-out from the human perspective, Xenophobes’ awareness of their surroundings simply could not be defined in human terms.

Without even a common means of perceiving the universe around them, it was small wonder humans and Xenos had blundered into a war that had lasted some forty-four years now. They’d been found on several planets colonized by man, subterranean organisms, thermovores drinking the heat of a world’s core, dwelling in caverns and passageways eaten out of solid rock. Over the course of hundreds of centuries, they multiplied in those caverns, spreading out, seeping through the joints and crevices between strata, reproducing until each colony was a single titanic organism massing as much as a small moon, a vast network threaded through much of the planet’s crust.

If the things had just remained underground there would have been no conflict with humans, but eventually pieces of these planetary organisms had risen from their chthonic bastions, drawn by the vast concentrations of pure metals and artificial materials that made up human cities. Several colony worlds—An-Nur II, Lung Chi, Herakles—had eventually been evacuated, abandoned to the Xeno scourge.

For four decades, humans had been fighting back, with cephlink-piloted warstriders, with orbital laser banks and HEMILCOM battle stations, and eventually with nuclear depth charges sent burrowing into the Xenophobes’ sub-surface lairs along channels of magnetically deformed rock. On a few infested worlds, on Loki and on alien, far-distant Alya A-VI, the Xenophobes had been obliterated, and the cities were being rebuilt.

Only now, after contact with the alien DalRiss of Alya A and B, was it possible to communicate with the things.

A DalRiss cornel was waiting for her in a cylinder mounted beside the travel pod. Rolling up her left sleeve, Katya thumbed the cylinder open. Wet, glistening gelatin was revealed within, and she carefully pushed her hand and bare forearm into the amorphous mass. Sensing her body warmth, the cornel molded itself to her skin. Its touch was cold and surprisingly dry. Like the Naga, the cornel was a thermovore, feeding on Katya’s body heat.

The Xenos, with their direct cell-to-cell networking, possessed nothing like a human language, and communication had been possible only through an intermediate agency, the sheath of translucent, alien tissue now covering Katya’s left hand and forearm like a rubber glove.

She flexed her fingers within the creature’s velvet embrace. The
cornel
was a living construct grown and programmed through the biological wizardry of yet another nonhuman intelligence, the DalRiss of distant Alya. Exactly how they managed that still seemed little short of magic, so far as human biologists could determine, but the DalRiss had been in constant contact—and warfare—with the Xenophobes infesting their two worlds for tens of thousands of years. Evidently, they’d learned a great deal about the enemy which they were as yet unable to communicate to humans.

“Okay, Fred,” she said. “Talk to me, fella.”

Slowly, Katya reached her comel-sheathed hand into the sphere, plunging through the layer of translucent jelly and touching one of the pulsing black masses within.…

Wonder… and dazzling excitement. Only recently sundered from the dark warmth and comfort of the vaster Self, »self« was not yet fully adjusted to the sharply narrowed vistas of memory and thought, or to the intense loneliness that isolated it now. Despite its loneliness, »self« trembled in the keen joy of revelation.…

Reeling, Katya pulled back, her cornel hand pulling free of the Naga’s embrace with a sucking sound. It took a moment for the spartan gray of the storeroom to reassert itself on her senses. The intense cascade of emotion and strangely twisted imagery from the Naga had been overpowering.

She’d come here frequently throughout the past months, trying to better understand Fred, trying to better understand the enigmatic Naga view of the universe. Katya had already learned that Nagas could not get bored… a good thing, she’d decided, for a being that, if her understanding of the visions transmitted through the cornel was accurate, was essentially immortal. A Naga’s sense of time appeared to be measured not by artificial demarcations like seconds but by the passage of events.

That’s another way they’re inside-out from us,
she thought.
For us, subjective time passes slowly when nothing’s going on, fast when everything’s happening at once. So far as Fred here is concerned, it’s only been a few moments since I talked to him last, and that was weeks ago.

Figuring that one out had been more hunch than brain work, a flash of inspiration that Sinclair had wryly called woman’s intuition. Now, if she could just figure out what Fred thought about the prospect of meeting a Naga that was
not
its original Self.…

Each Naga, evidently, had considerable difficulty understanding the concept of other intelligences… even of other Nagas. A planetary Naga was a literally Self-absorbed creature, its awareness limited to what was Self and what was not. Scouts—fragments such as Fred—yearned for reabsorption into the greater Self, to be Self instead of the sharply delimited and shrunken »self«, but even that experience couldn’t wholly prepare a Naga World Mind for the shock of meeting
another
being like itself.

The Nagas, it was now known, once they’d converted much of the crust of a planet to their own purposes, entered a reproductive phase, hurling spore pods by the billions into space on intensely powerful magnetic fluxes. Most of those pods were lost in vastness, but a scant few, guided by biologically programmed instincts homing on heat and magnetic fields, reached the worlds of other stars after millions of years of dreamless sleep adrift. Touching down, they tunneled into virgin crust and began the cycle anew.

But from the weirdly inverted Naga point of view, it wasn’t that way at all. The universe was a Void surrounded by endless depths of rock; so far as the Nagas themselves were concerned, their voyages across interstellar space were mere excursions from one wall of a rock-walled gulf to another… and the eventless ages separating launch from planetfall and rebirth literally no time at all.

Bracing herself, she reached in once more with her comel-clad hand.…

Excitement.Shells of the not-Self’s-that-know move within the Void.

Katya furrowed her brow as she leaned closer, trying to decipher the torrent of alien thoughts.

Enemy… the enemy? The enemy… is coming, and »self« must be protected.…

She concentrated on key thoughts. Soon, the Naga would be taken into the Void once more—
Wonder! Soaring, dizzying emptiness stretching out forever on every side!
—and transported to another world—
What is “world?”
—where it would be allowed to rejoin a Self that would have no knowledge of humans.