Symbionts (40 page)

“You have a Naga fragment aboard your ship?” Katya asked.

“Aboard every one of the ships you now perceive, yes. They provide each with its ability to maneuver, to fight, to repair itself. They are also quite useful for helping to maintain the necessary environment.”

They would be, at that. Dev turned his gaze briefly on the planet turning slowly below. Birthworld of DalRissan life, GhegnuRish had been abandoned by them after centuries of near-incessant war with the Xenophobe lurking beneath the planet’s crust. At some time after the last DalRiss evacuated the world, the Xenophobe had undergone a transition natural for that species, from what human researchers called its acquisitive phase to its contemplative phase. By that time, much of the planet’s surface had already been altered by the dark interloper. Whole DalRissan cities had been assimilated within the Naga’s plastic embrace, and the atmosphere itself was slowly being changed, not, it turned out, in any deliberate attempt to render the world uninhabitable, but simply as the vast Naga in its subsurface tunnels and caverns had drawn on cities, on rock, on the atmosphere itself as building materials for its own use.

After Dev had established contact with the Xeno, however, a dialogue between the Naga and the DalRiss had begun. Even before the First Expeditionary Force had departed for Earth, DalRiss had returned to the surface of their homeworld and had begun guiding the planetary Naga in reconstructing the demolished environment. For three years, the Naga had been absorbing air from the GhegnuRish atmosphere, converting it to the standard gas mix favored by the DalRiss, and releasing it again. DalRiss biologists had even been using the Naga’s ability to pattern living forms absorbed by it and piece together replicas literally atom by atom to begin repopulating the planet’s surface with the plant and animal species that long before had been driven to extinction by the original war.

Oh, yes. If the Naga could do all of that, they would be real wizards at creating and maintaining specific environments!

“Could you modify your ships to carry humans?” Katya wanted to know.

“Creating an area within a ship that supplied your range of temperature and gas mix would present no problem,” the DalRiss replied after a moment. “There would be difficulties, though, in control.”

“I imagine,” Dev added, “that you, the Riss part of you, anyway, tap into the ship’s nervous system directly.”

“That is essentially correct. We receive input directly from the ship’s senses. Our thoughts guide the ship just as they guide our Dal. With this new construction, there is actually a three-way linkage between the ship, the Riss piloting it, and the Naga fragment that makes up part of the ship’s nervous system.”

“It sounds very much like the way we do things,” Dev said. “Humans are linked electronically to the artificial intelligence, the computer network that serves as a kind of nervous system for our ship. We do electronically what you do through some very advanced biology.”

“We had surmised as much, from our studies with the Japanese observers. Your electronic systems, the implants you call cephlinks, would not be directly compatible with our biological systems. Some sort of direct connection would be necessary, too, in order for you to pass on navigational commands to the ship’s Achiever. The Achiever, you see, must visualize the desired destination. That is simple if the Achiever has been at the target destination before. It can be accomplished if the target can simply be seen, by picking out a particular star, say. That is how we first made contact with your species, as you may know. We’d been receiving radio signals from that volume of space occupied by humans for some time. We were aware of a particular star quite similar in age and mass to our own, the star you humans call Altair. Basically, we pointed out Altair to an Achiever and told it to go there.

“The system works best, however, if the pilot has been to the destination and can pass on his impressions to the Achiever first. It allows a much finer focus and more accuracy when you emerge on the other side.”

“Jumping blind, you could end up inside your target sun,” Dev said. “Or so far away you might have to make several more small jumps to zero in on your target. I can see that.”

“Precisely.”

“You know,” Dev said slowly, the hesitation dragging at his mental voice, “a cornel is nothing but a translator and not always a completely accurate one at that. It doesn’t provide enough of a bridge between humans and DalRiss for the level of linkage required for this type of navigation.”

“It is not fast enough, either.”

“Right. But a human could link directly with the Naga aboard one of your ships. The Naga would then be linked to the ship and to the Achiever. In that way, humans could pilot your vessels.”

There was a long silence over the radio link, as though the DalRiss were considering this. “That could well be. Would you consider participating in the experiment?”

“Dev,” Katya said, alarmed. “I don’t—”

“I would,” Dev told the DalRiss, interrupting her. He then sent her a private message over the navlink. “Don’t worry, Kat. I know what I’m doing.”

“You’re thinking about doing another Xenolink!”

“Not quite. This won’t be the same thing. The Nagas in these ships are buds off a planetary Naga, fragments massing a few tons… well, a few thousand tons, maybe, in the case of their biggest ships. Still, it won’t be like tapping into that monster on Herakles.”

“Then let someone else do it, damn it!”

“Why? I’m the one with the experience. If it works for me, maybe we could expand on the idea. But I’m the one with the experience linking with Xenos.
And
I can navigate a starship.”

“So can I! And I’ve linked with Xenos, too!”

“Not the way I have, you haven’t. I… let’s just say I have an idea of what’s possible.”

“Kuso,
Dev. I don’t know if you should do this! If I should
let
you do this.”

“I have to, Kat, and you have to let me. We’ve got to find out if humans can work DalRiss ships. If they can, oh, God! We’ve got the Rebellion won. Think of it! One battle, with ships that can travel instantly from point A to point B. The Empire would know they would never stand a chance. Katya, they’ll give us everything we want!”

“But at what cost?”

“They don’t seem to be into trade, much, Kat.”

“That wasn’t the cost I was talking about, Dev. And I think you’re smart enough now to realize that.”

Katya, too, possessed a keen intuition and knew that Dev had chosen to deliberately misunderstand her.

“You’re right, Katya. Of course. But if Travis Sinclair were here, wouldn’t he say that winning the war against the Empire, winning it without losing millions of lives in the process, was worth almost any price you could name?”

“No, he wouldn’t, Dev. He’d say that victory wasn’t worth it if it made us like the Imperials. Or if we had to give up being human. Damn it, Dev, what is it we’re fighting for? Isn’t it the right to be our own crazy brand of human?”

“And if only one human risks giving up his humanity?So that the whole Confederacy, the whole Frontier, maybe, can be free?”

“I… don’t know, Dev.”

“Neither do I. But we’re going to explore the possibilities.”

It didn’t take much longer to arrange things with the DalRiss. The experiment, which the DalRiss were as interested in as the humans, could take place almost immediately.

And so far as Dev was concerned, the sooner, the better.

Chapter 28

Remember this maxim of space warfare. Ultimately, all weapons rely one way or another on mass and energy. A nuclear detonation yields tremendous energy in a single devastating burst. Know, however, that an asteroid, a rock, a single loose bolt, given sufficient velocity to yield kinetic energy according to the time-honored formula of E
=
mc
²
, can yield more raw, destructive energy than the largest thermonuclear warhead.

—
Strategy and Tactics of Space Warfare

Imperial Naval War College

Kyoto, Nihon

C.E.
2530

The DalRiss had provided Dev with a tiny compartment buried deep within the heart of the Alyan ship, a place where the atmosphere was identical to that provided by
Eagle’s
life support systems, where the temperature hovered at a warm and somewhat humid thirty-five degrees, where light came from no identifiable source but seemed to bathe every surface of the room in a diffuse and gentle glow.

That room was like no room aboard any human-built starship. With no corners, no sharp angles, with every surface like every other in the disorienting no-way-is-up of zero gravity, Dev found himself momentarily lost. He was a pro at handling himself in zero-G, of course, but the trick in free fall was to identify some arbitrary direction as “down” and keep convincing your brain that it was. With a little practice and some stubborn make-believe, the body adapted, and the mind could ignore the confusing loss of orientation.

Here, though, every surface was disturbingly like the inside of a huge, soft, glowing pink stomach… no, it was more like a living womb, with fleshy, muscular walls. It wasn’t very large, either, and Dev was glad that he’d insisted on overruling Katya when she’d volunteered to come instead. With her claustrophobia, floating in a chamber so narrow that he could touch any two opposite walls with his outstretched arms and could never fully extend his legs… well, maybe he was the best one for this test after all. Despite what he’d told her, he’d had his doubts.

He’d floated across from
Eagle
wearing a full-body E-suit and been admitted through something disturbingly like a toothless mouth opening in the side of the DalRiss ship. Successive doors had opened before him, guiding him through the lumen of a glowing, slick-surfaced tube that brought to mind other anatomical comparisons that he’d much rather have ignored. A radio voice through the compatch jacked into his left T-socket told him when the atmosphere was right for him; he’d peeled off the E-suit and PLSS unit and left them in one room; now, naked except for the cornel he wore on his left arm, he floated with knees curled almost to chest within the warm embrace of his quarters aboard the DalRiss ship.

“How am I supposed to link from here?” he asked aloud. The air had a faint odor, mildly unpleasant, somewhat sulfurous. He wondered if his hosts were listening to him over the cornel or whether the room could pick up his speech and translate it directly. Not that it mattered, but he was interested in the way these people did things.

In reply, an irregular section of the wall directly in front of him and measuring a full meter across went dark. Slowly, a deeper darkness, inky absence of all light and color began diffusing through the living surface. Shapes swam in the blackness, tarry lumps, ranging in size from the length of his outstretched hand to the size of his head. He’d seen it before more than once and knew immediately what it was.

Somehow, the ship’s Naga had extruded this portion of itself into his cell. Quickly, before he could lose his nerve, he stretched out his left hand and let the cornel sink into the blackness.…

Completeness.…

… of being… of perception…

Well-being.…

Memories… of linking with the Naga of GhegnuRish… and again on Eridu… and still again on Herakles. Information, rich torrents of it… and the certain knowledge that I am not alone.…

Loneliness. I/we share that incompleteness.

Together…

… we share…

… completeness.…

For Dev, it was as though he’d just jacked in aboard the
Eagle.
The uterine, claustrophobic room, the black, tarry patch on the wall, the falling sensation of zero-G all were gone. Instead, he felt as though he were hanging alone in space.

No… it was not quite the same as
Eagle
in one critical respect. He was receiving visual input from every direction at once, viewing a full 360 degrees across two axes. When linked to ship or warstrider, data from all directions could be fed to the jacker, but his own cephlink program filtered out all but the area he was focused on. It was too disorienting otherwise, for beings that had never evolved eyes in the backs of their heads.

Strange… he found he could handle the input, as easily as he could override his own cephlink’s programming. Was that part of the change within his own brain? It was difficult, even painful, like stretching muscles long unused, but Dev stretched… and found he was making sense of the jumbled cascade of incoming data.

Half the sky was occupied by GhegnuRish, a vast blur of white clouds and violet seas, of ocher deserts and the flecks of pink and orange that marked the return of life to the long-barren DalRiss homeworld. Opposite, backlit by the searing glare of Alya B,
Eagle
hung in space like a complex and crisply detailed gray-and-black toy, its hab modules rotating steadily about its long axis just aft of the bow, its strobing anticollision lights pulsing against the blackness of the shadows across its hull. Elsewhere, the host of DalRiss ships gleamed like snowflakes, each pursuing its own orbit about the world.

With a moment’s practice, Dev found that he could voluntarily limit the information flooding through his brain, in effect blocking out the view in all but one direction. But he could also work with that data, and he decided not to exclude anything, at least until he had a better idea of the potentials of this linkage.

…
this taste of the universe…

… is strange.…

… different from any tasted before.…

The Naga’s thoughts were an alien turmoil of senses that Dev had experienced before, but only during linkages with other Nagas. He could taste the magnetic field around the ship, for instance, as a kind of smoky, pungent sharpness that brought to mind sensations of a tickle at the back of his throat. He sensed radio as well, pulses felt rather than seen or heard, but bearing with each brush information about direction and strength, with frequency distinguished by a kind of thrumming vibration sensed behind his ears, high-pitched or low, like the unheard trembling of sounds just beyond the range of human hearing.