Jackers (33 page)

Dev rarely indulged in jigging. He’d long ago found that he didn’t like these alter egos, to the point that he’d begun to think that he honestly didn’t like himself. Possibly, that was a bit of psychological foreshortening, caused by the fact that his ego fragments were just that, fragments of himself, and not himself as a whole.

ViRsex, he found, spoke only to that ego fragment of himself he called The Lover, the part of himself concerned almost entirely with Katya as a sexual partner.

But this…
this…

He snuggled closer to her, arms enfolding her tightly.
This
touched every part of his being, body, mind and soul, in ways he’d never imagined possible.

It… no,
she…
made him whole.

Chapter 22

A single Xenophobe “cell”
—
more properly known as a “paracell” or “supracell” to distinguish it from the microscopic cells of Earth-based life
—
masses approximately one to two kilograms and is capable of a slow, sluglike motility. Possessing little intelligence of its own beyond a certain innate homeotropism, it has been likened to an individual human neuron.

Xenophobe intelligence is, in fact, a function of the number and interconnectedness of a variable but large number of these paracells. Xenophobe travellers, consisting of several thousand paracells and massing three to five tons, may possess an intelligence roughly analogous to that of a human. A planetary Xenophobe, composed of as many as 10
¹⁷
supracells, may possess an intelligence utterly beyond the human ken.

Obviously, the nature of that intelligence is radically different from ours.

—
The Xenophobe Wars

Dr. Francine Torrey

C.E.
2543

The passageway seemed to stretch on ahead forever, smooth-walled, sloping downward at nearly a ten-degree angle. Dev was in the lead, encased in a one-man RLN-90 Scoutstrider, taking each step carefully as though in anticipation of deadfalls or pits. Walls, floors, and ceiling were smoothly rounded, the one blending into the next without visible seam or joint. It was like walking down a long, straight pipeline hewn through smooth rock; the tube’s lumen was only three meters, so Dev had to keep his warstrider folded in on itself, legs sharply angled to keep his dorsal sensors and weapons packs from scraping along the ceiling. An array of four spotlights mounted on the forward hull of his strider cast a brilliant white light into the tunnel’s depths ahead, though so far, for thousands of meters, there’d been nothing whatsoever to see.

Eighty meters to his rear came a second walker, a smaller, sleeker LaG-17 Fastrider jacked by Vic Hagan. His machine was towing a maglifter pallet in its wake, with Fred’s travel pod strapped to its bed.

“According to your sonar we ought to be getting close.” Hagan’s voice sounded in Dev’s link. Though they were in separate machines, the sensory data from Dev’s strider was being relayed to Vic for analysis. This allowed Dev to remain alert with the Scoutstrider’s weapons, just as though the two of them were jacked in side by side in a two-slotter combat machine. “Another five klicks or so.”

“Affirmative,” Dev replied. The same data was accessible within his virtual imagery, but he scarcely glanced at it. “I’ll be glad when we hit bottom. I feel like I’m crawling around in somebody’s large intestine.”

“I’m linked with you there.”

“Katya?” Dev called. “Are you still with us?”

“We’re here, Dev.” Her voice was hard and tight and edged with a crackling burr of static. The two striders had been leaving a trail of communications relays as they descended, but so much rock still swallowed both radio and laser carriers, and so many communications links amplified inefficiencies. No one knew how long the two striders descending into Herakles’s bowels would remain in contact with their fellows on the surface.

Surely it was his imagination, but Dev could almost sense the weight of the artificial mountain pressing down on him from above. That mountain, and the other atmosphere generation plants, had been grown by programmed nano that had excavated thousands of tunnels like this one deep into the crust of the planet, transporting the rock up to the surface literally molecule by molecule, where it was rearranged into the unyielding fabricrete and duralloy and ferrocarb of the mountain itself, and its internal mechanisms. Those empty tunnels had been left behind, becoming part of the atmospheric nanogenerator’s circulation system and a means of storing pure gases—oxygen or nitrogen—until enough had been accumulated that they could be released in the proper ratios.

And now, those seemingly endless nano-drilled tunnels had a new use.

There was Rock… and not-Rock, Self and not-Self, a universe described in the dualistic is/is-not of an evolution shaped by absolutes. The dichotomy of being was simple and self-evident. Physical form could be described as Rock, infinite in extent, near infinite in its subtle variability and composition and chemistries at both super- and submolecular levels. Not-Rock was all else, the channels and chambers and node-enclosures of thin, near-vacuum that housed and enclosed and sheltered Self.

Mental form—awareness, consciousness, ego, thought, volition, action—was Self, though here the simplistic dualism of being and not-being, of yes and no, grew rapidly more complex. Once, perhaps, though the memories were hazy now with the endless march of intervening events, Self had simply been Self, but even Self could change. Indeed, Self measured the difference between Self and Rock not only in its capacity to sense, store data, and reason, but in its capacity for change, deliberate or otherwise. It had learned, incalculable numbers of events past, how to pinch off a minute fraction of its own being, tiny localizations of purpose and will distinct from Self, a thinking and sensing awareness that was not Self, but »self«.

The discovery of »self« was arguably the most important step in the evolution of Self, a means to reach out into the surrounding darkness and warmth of Mother Rock and gather experience, memories, even samples of the Rock beyond the Here of Self. A »self« would set forth, sundered from Self, keening the sharp pains of loneliness and loss. No longer Self, its experience of the universe was not immediately accessible, could not be accessible until the »self« returned to Self, was reabsorbed into a larger being and a more complete awareness and its memories commingled with the whole. The philosophical implications were staggering. Could there actually be experience—events, awareness, change, the stuff of memories—taking place in the universe beyond the grasp of Self?

Astonishing as the implications were, experience with countless billions of »selves« had proven this to be the case. There was Being outside of Self and more to the universe than an infinite sea of Rock. There was Here—where Self was—and there was not-Here. Events could transpire within a seemingly infinite not-Here, a process that defied all that Self had thought it knew and understood.

Self had still been grappling with the concept when it had encountered the Burning.

From what Dev and Katya been able to learn from the planetary Nagas on the DalRiss homeworld of Alya B-V and on Eridu, Nagas began as small nodes of interconnected supracells deep within a planet’s crust, planted there by the arrival of a Naga reproductive pod riding the world’s magnetic fields down from space. With millions of nanotechnic organelles existing in symbiosis with each supracell’s organic components, the creatures were able to hollow out pockets and passageways within solid rock, in much the same way as the terraformers had programmed the nano that had delved these tunnels beneath the atmosphere generators.

The devoured rock became raw material for new supracells, organic and inorganic components alike drawn from the world’s inner treasure troves of silicon, oxygen, carbon, iron, nickel, and every other common element. The building blocks of a world, after all, and the building blocks for a living creature were all much the same, differing only in their ratios and in the manner of their arrangement.

For perhaps hundreds of millions of years, the Naga nodes tunneled and reproduced. Thermovores, they made use of the planet’s internal heat, utilizing the energy to metabolize the rock literally molecule by molecule, Pockets or veins of pure metal ores or other substances were best, requiring less energy to extract them.

Eventually, the Nagas occupied much of the planetary crust, from just beneath the surface to that depth where heat and pressure exceeded their tolerance levels. Possessing numerous senses understood dimly by humans, if at all, they were able to detect large concentrations of pure substances at considerable distances, even through solid rock. To a Naga node, a human city, even a single warstrider, represented an incredible bounty of pure metals, polymers, and ceramics, of pure diamond woven into thin, readily accessible sheets, of vast numbers of nanotechnic machines the size of single, large molecules ready for assimilation and reprogramming. As the first Naga scouts neared the surface of a world occupied by humans, they were drawn to these concentrations of raw materials. Unaware that the delicate carbon-based life-forms in their way were anything other than some strangely patterned natural phenomena, the scouts began to feed.…

Which, of course, had been interpreted by humans as an attack by monstrous, alien, and utterly incomprehensible foes.

On Alya B-V, the DalRiss had been forced to evacuate their own birthworld as the Nagas emerged everywhere, transforming cities, the surface of entire continents into nightmare fantasies shaped by alien notions of line and form and function. In time, countless separate nodes had united, until every supracell on and in the world was interlinked, neurons of a single, vast brain of incomprehensible scope. At that point, the organism changed, its drives shifting from those of the restless, acquisitive phase to the sessile—and reproductive—contemplative form.

So much was known about the Naga, communicated by the now “tame” organism inhabiting Eridu through the intermediate agency of a living DalRiss cornel. So much more was mystery still. What triggered the transition from the acquisitive to the contemplative phases? How long did it take? Xenophobe notions of time bore no relationship at all to those of humans; indeed, time seemed to mean little to organisms that possessed memories—and oddly packaged and disordered memories at that—stretching back for hundreds of millions or even billions of years and embracing long chains of successive worlds.

The question had taken on a fairly pressing, new importance on Mu Herculis. Twenty-eight years ago, the first Xenophobe scouts had emerged from underground and begun devouring human settlements. Three decades was the flicker of an eye compared to the time spans enjoyed by the Nagas, but when the organisms began breaking through to the, to them, alien surface of a world, that seemed to be a sign that the transformation was close at hand. When Dev had settled on Mu Herculis III as the place to conduct this communications experiment, he’d based the choice at least in part on the hope that the Heraklean Naga had settled down, beginning the change from the acquisitive to the contemplative phase. The Naga he’d communicated with on Alya B-V had been contemplative; the one on Eridu that Katya had encountered had still been acquisitive, but on the verge of making the change, with most of its nodes already interconnected with one another and its group intelligence already of a fantastically high order.

But in twenty-eight years, the Naga occupying the Heraklean crust had not shown itself since the day Argos had vanished in a sea of nuclear fire. A careful, almost kilometer by kilometer search of the planetary surface from orbit had shown no trace of the organism.

It was entirely possible that the thing was dead. Not likely, certainly, given that an organism that occupied much of a planet’s crust massed as much as a fair-sized moon, but it was possible. If the Xenophobes attacking the Heraklean colony had been a single, relatively young node that had been located by chance near Argos, then the entire node could have been destroyed by the nuclear blast that had so altered the shape of the Augean Peninsula.

But Dev didn’t think that likely. A planet is so vast a place, the coincidence of Man and Xenophobe both beginning their colonizations from the same point and at very nearly the same time was too great to consider seriously.

And yet… where was the Heraklean Naga now? Automated probes—AI landers bearing sensitive instruments capable of tracking a Xeno’s DSA, the Deep Seismic Anomaly associated with its movements far underground—had set down by the hundreds on every continent and major island on the planet. In two months they’d heard nothing save for the purely natural groanings and rumblings of a living planet’s internal workings.

And so, Dev and Vic had decided that they would have to continue the search in a more direct fashion. The empty tunnels beneath an atmospheric nanogenerator penetrated the planet’s crust to a depth of one or two kilometers in places, far enough down that the temperature reached seventy degrees or more, rising twenty-five degrees Celsius for every kilometer’s drop in depth.

Surely the Nagas, with their singleminded hunger for pure metals and manufactured composites would have sought out the artificial mountains of the atmosphere plants, at least so far as to explore them. The mountain pressing down on Dev now was Heraklean Atmospheric Nanoprocessing Facility One, the closest of all of the planet’s terraforming plants to the place where Argos had stood. The Xenos must have penetrated the place, at least as far as these tunnels.

Dev could imagine no other way of reaching the Naga than to penetrate the tunnels’ lower reaches. The only problem he could see was one that had been haunting him for some time now.

Assuming there
were
still living Nagas within Herakles, their lack of activity was atypical… and therefore potentially dangerous. Quite possibly the planet’s inhabitants were being quiet because they didn’t care to receive visitors.