Symbionts
Authors: William H. Keith
WARSTRIDER
SYMBIONTS — 04
WILLIAM H. KEITH, JR.
AVON BOOKS • NEW YORK
If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”
WARSTRIDER: SYMBIONTS is an original publication of Avon Books. This work has never before appeared in book form. This work is a novel. Any similarity to actual persons or events is purely coincidental.
AVON BOOKS
A division of
The Hearst Corporation
1350 Avenue of the Americas
New York, New York 10019
Copyright © 1995 by William H. Keith, Jr.
Cover art by Dorian Vallejo
Published by arrangement with the author
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 94-96361
ISBN: 0-380-77592-1
All rights reserved, which includes the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever except as provided by the U.S. Copyright Law. For information address The Ethan Ellenberg Literary Agency, 548 Broadway, #5E, New York, New York 10012.
First AvoNova Printing: April 1995
AVONOVA TRADEMARK REG. U.S. PAT. OFF. AND IN OTHER COUNTRIES. MARCA REGISTRADA. HECHO EN U.S.A.
Printed in the U.S.A.
RA 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Prologue
It was early morning and the tiny, arc-brilliant disk of Alya A was just rising above the mountains to the east, setting golden clouds aflame in a silver-and-violet glare that touched the domes and upthrust commo towers of the Imperial base with white flame. A storm the night before had left puddles of highly acidic rainwater steaming on the pavement. That once-smooth surface was going to need replacement soon; the elements on the world called ShraRish were hard on structures and materials fabricated by Man.
Inside the perimeter fence that surrounded the human base, a warstrider stood watch, an Imperial KY-1001 Katana, five and a half meters tall and massing thirty tons, its jet black, armored hull bristling with articulated lasers and missile pods. Servos whined as one great, flanged foot lifted clear of the pavement, then set down again with a heavy thud, a three-meter step. External sensors were fully deployed, scanning in a complete circle around the lumbering machine.
Shosa
Shigetaro Tsuyama had been on duty that morning since the end of the first watch. His number two aboard the two-slotter Katana was
Chu-i
Yoshikata Sanada, jacked into the strider’s right-side pod. At the moment, Sanada had control of the Katana’s main gun, the big, blunt 150-MW laser in its universal mount set beneath the strider’s flattened, aircraftlike hull, while Tsuyama had reserved piloting functions and the secondary weapons to himself. Briefly, he halted the Katana’s pacing and focused his main sensor array toward the sunrise.
Linked through the web of nano-grown threads riding in and over the folds of his cerebral cortex, jacked into the Katana’s artificial intelligence through feeds plugged into sockets behind each ear and at the base of his neck, Tsuyama was for the moment completely unaware of his flesh-and-blood body, tucked away within its coffinlike command slot inside the warstrider’s hull. As far as he was concerned,
he
was the warstrider, the big combat machine’s precise and graceful movements guided directly by his brain’s neural impulses, which were rerouted through his cephlink and the Katana’s AI before they reached his spinal column.
The sun climbed slowly higher, clearing the mountains and brightening in his vision until the automatic filters in his optics cut in. Beyond the blasted patch of naked ground staked out by the electrified perimeter fence, the ground cover, ruffled clumps of gold and yellow, began its writhing dance.
Sugoi,
he thought. The Nihongo word could mean marvelous or wonderful, but the taste he gave it now in his mind carried the connotation of weird, even ghastly. Tsuyama longed for a decent world, one where a man could breathe the air and where the plants didn’t crawl, where there were colonist girls to jack with and where the native population didn’t look like some horrid mixing of eyeless monstrosities best left in the blackness of the ocean depths.
With an inward sigh, he checked the time. Another two hours to go. Warstrider sentry duty here, he decided, was a complete waste of time. The security watch behind the perimeter fence could just as easily have been left to robots or to the automated laser cannons in their teleoperated turrets. The DalRiss were harmless, and everyone knew that the Xenophobe on ShraRish was dead.
Everyone.
“Shosasan?”
his number two said over the strider’s intercom. “Are they sure the Xenophobe here is dead?”
The sublieutenant might have been echoing Tsuyama’s own thoughts.
“Certainly,
Sanadasan.
The creature is no more. Otherwise it would have eaten us in the night,
neh?”
Things weren’t quite that simple, of course. During the past half century, the life-form originally labeled “Xenophobes” had been encountered on half a dozen inhabited worlds of the Shichiju. Their seemingly irrational attacks on human colonies, the mass murders of entire populations on planets like Herakles and Lung Chi, were assumed to be the result of some xenophobic twist in their psychologies, hence their name. Contact, when it was made at last, had demonstrated that the Xenos—renamed “Nagas” after the pacific serpent deities of Hindu mythology—had not even been aware of humans as intelligent individuals. Indeed, their introspective and strangely inverted worldview had kept each world-Naga from realizing that there was any intelligence, any
life
in its entire inside-out universe of Rock and not-Rock other than itself.
The DalRiss also had an odd way of looking at things, though their worldview didn’t seem so alien to Tsuyama as did that of the Naga. They, at least, possessed a technology of sorts, and cities, and starcraft… though they seemed to have developed that technology along almost entirely biological lines, breeding their machines rather than manufacturing them.
“Shosasan!”
Sanada sounded worried.
“What is it,
Sanadasan?”
“I… I think something is moving out there.”
“Where?”
“At zero-eight-five degrees.Just outside the fence.”
Almost directly into the rising sun. Tsuyama squinted against the glare, dazzling even through his stopped-down optics. Briefly, he shifted to radar, then to ladar ranging, and finally to infrared, heavily filtered. “I see nothing but the city,” he told Sanada, interpreting the radar and laser returns as DalRiss buildings. The alien city, if that was what that strange clumping of organic forms really was, lay just beyond the perimeter fence to the east.
“Something is moving there! I’m sure of it!”
“Kuso!
Everything on this accursed planet moves!” Motion sensors here were all but useless, fooled by the peculiarly twitching plant life. Even the DalRiss buildings—if you could call them that—could move at times. Tsuyama had seen one once, slowly gliding into the nearby city like an enormous slug.
The DalRiss moving about?Possible. Even probable, though the aliens, like most of the rest of the life on this star-baked hothouse of a world, got much of their energy directly from sunlight and rarely stirred until later in the day. Certainly the Rebellion posed no threat, this far from the Shichiju. Or so he and Sanada had been repeatedly told.…
Still, Tsuyama was fully on his guard now. While the Rebellion that was tearing the Terran Hegemony apart was a long, long way from ShraRish, he’d still heard plenty of rumors brought in by the shipjackers aboard freighters and escorts that continually came and went between the Shichiju and the twin Alyan suns. According to some stories, the rebels and their so-called Confederation had won a battle against Imperial forces on a planet called Eridu… and during the battle the Eriduan Naga had appeared from underground, attacking Imperial forces as though it had allied itself with the enemy. Even stranger things were rumored to have happened in a space battle a few months ago in the Heraklean system. The cargo jacker who’d whispered that story to Tsuyama had insisted that an Imperial Ryu-class carrier had been destroyed. Ridiculous, obviously… and yet the rumors, as they so often seemed to, were taking on a greater and greater life of their own.
A rebel treaty with aliens? No one seriously believed that creatures as alien as the Naga or the DalRiss could understand the intricacies of human politics… or care enough about them to ally themselves with one side or the other. But here, in this harshly alien setting, it was possible to imagine almost anything.…
An alarm shrilled in Tsuyama’s mind, a harsh ululation relayed through the Base Military Command Center. Warnings scrolled down the right side of his visual field; something… something
big
was coming through the fence.
Tsuyama urged the Katana into a lumbering run, thumping across the uneven pavement to take the target, whatever it was, out from between the strider and the rising sun.
“Shiro Hana! Shiro Hana!”
sounded over his communications link, the code name for his patrol. “Fence breach, section two-one! What do you see?”
It
looked
like one of the bizarre, living DalRiss buildings, tangled in the fence, but Tsuyama wasn’t sure enough of what he was seeing to want to report it. The fence, eight meters tall, was a crisscrossed weave of conductive ferrofilament, each line thread-slender but with a superconducting core that charged the entire structure with high-amperage current. The… the building, if that was what it was, had blundered into the fence forty meters from the nearest gatehouse, snapping the lower portion of the mesh in a crackling haze of sparks and lightning.
DalRiss buildings—when they were stationary, at least—had always reminded Tsuyama of enormous gourds or summer squash, shiny, smooth-surfaced, organic shapes eight or ten meters long and perhaps half that in diameter. Moving, they appeared more worm- or sluglike, crawling along with slow-motion contractions of their bellies that could propel them at a good half kilometer per hour or so across level ground.
The front end of the one on the fence gaped like a distended, open mouth; less identifiable growths, like great blisters or air sacs, were scattered randomly across its back. Ancestors! Was the thing sick?
It was still twitching as the lightning played across it, but surely it must be dead by now, the body convulsing with the arcing current. But another DalRiss construct was pressing up close by… and beyond that another… and another…
“Command Center!” he called. “This is
Shiro Hana!
It… it looks like DalRiss buildings on the move. Gods! The whole city is moving! Coming this way!”
“Muri-yo!”
Ops Command snapped back. “That’s impossible!”
“It’s true! I see ten… twelve of those building-creatures! They’re smashing through the fence!”
With a final crackle of electricity, a twenty-meter section of the fence went down. Three of the DalRiss buildings lay partway into the compound, motionless now, but the others were still coming, sliding over the dead bodies of their fellows like enormous, shell-less, cave-mouthed snails.