Battlemind (3 page)

It almost looked as though some child giant had used this world as clay, sculpting bizarrely twisted and alien forms from naked rock and leaving them to bake beneath that searing sky. Kara could see walls, towers, domes, and less readily namable structures, linked together by a subtle architecture that obeyed no human laws of perspective or design. Towers speared the heavens, ebon-black or mercury-silver in color, with angles oddly distorted from geometries used by Man. A deep, convoluted, and black-shadowed canyon reaching for fully a thousand kilometers across the planet’s face had been turned into an elaborate trench lined with machine hardware, spanned by glittering bridges and floored by forests of antennae and mechanisms of unknown and unknowable purpose.

At an altitude of less than a kilometer, Kara pulled her nose up, spilling energy freely in a burst of high-intensity magnetics, supplementing her rugged deceleration with the whining shriek of plasma jets. The new setup and link with the Mark XC striders permitted accelerations and decelerations unheard of in human-occupied flyers, with the thrust limited only by the tolerances of the machine’s drives and hull strength, though the visual cues unfolding on the view-screen in her head took some real getting used to.

So far, there’d been no response from the defenders of this alien place. Past the trench now, still descending, she led her company toward the landing site chosen from space just moments ago, an open patch of gray plain partly surrounded by spiked, bristling towers each half a kilometer tall or more. Surface-penetrating radar and IR traces gave indications of a labyrinthine tangle of structures hidden beneath the surface.

“There’s the LZ, gang,” she called over the tactical frequency. “Let’s take ’em on in.”

“Roger that, boss,” Lieutenant Hochstader replied. “Looks like we caught the gokkers napping.”

“Don’t count on that, Lieutenant,” she replied. “They know we’re here.”

“I wonder,” Warstrider Miles Pritchard said. “I get the feeling that maybe they know, but they just don’t
care.”

That was a frightening thought… beings so advanced, or so different, that human beings had little or no impact on their plans. But then, Core D9837 seemed to be a very minor part of their operation in this place, a debris pile with no significance to their vaster strategies and goals.

“Maybe they don’t care,” Sergeant Willis Daniels, her top sergeant, added.
“Yet.”

“Well, we can damn well give them something to care about, Will,” Kara said. Extending her craft’s flight surfaces, she flared out above the selected landing zone, her warstrider’s outer hull, a Naga-grown composite, changing both shape and texture as surface-mobile modules unfolded. Normally in a landing op like this one, she would have loosed clouds of nano converters to change the soil to a charged surface, but the ground here already bore current associated with the surrounding alien structures. Magnetics engaged, slowing Kara’s strider to a gentle hover meters above the ground. Legs extended, insectlike, black, gleaming, and chitinous, with tools and sensors extruding to taste the alien air. Carefully, she pivoted through a complete three-sixty, scanning for some response from the foe.

The scout force had not known what to expect on this run; that was one reason the operation, code-named Core Peek, had been organized. So far, humans had managed to snatch only the briefest and most unsatisfactory of glimpses of Web activities at the Galactic Core. Only one manned vessel had ever come through the Nova Aquila Gate to this place, and that had been destroyed seconds after its arrival. Many succeeding attempts had been made by sophisticated robot probes, all with Naga cores deliberately downloaded with misleading information, in the hope that Web intelligence about the location of Humanity’s worlds could be confused. Operation Shell Game, that effort had been named; presumably, it had worked, since the Web had not launched another effort against the worlds of the Shichiju in the past two years.

But at the same time, Humanity had learned little about the Web. Some of those probes had been spotted and destroyed instantly, while others had survived for a long time before being detected and hunted down. The planners of this mission had suspected that Model XC striders, slipping through the Gate at high speed and with full stealth nanoflage engaged, might get all the way to Core D9837 without being spotted. Their entry into atmosphere, however, could not have gone unnoticed. Webbers were known to see into the infrared.

Her view of her surroundings, relayed through her strider’s external sensors and unfolding directly in her mind, was overlaid by smaller windows, one showing systems status displays, another showing a map of her surroundings, complete with the blue-pinpointed positions of her comrades and the locations of unknowns—potential enemies—in red. And there
were
unknowns out there, hundreds of them, with more appearing on her screen every moment. The shadows beyond the unit’s LZ literally crawled with…
things,
though at this range all that could be said about them was that they were metallic, that they possessed powerful, self-contained magnetic fields, and that they were moving.

They were, in fact, beginning to converge on the landing force.

“On alert, people,” she snapped. “We’ve got company!”

“I’ve got bogies at three-five,” Daniels called. “Comin’ in fast! Don’t know what they are. I can’t get a hard fix and I’ve never seen—”

And then the machine army struck.

Chapter 2

The DalRiss taught us that intelligence could evolve in surprising ways, yet remain fundamentally the same as that possessed by humans. They were alien, but we could, at the very least, understand their point of view.

The Naga taught us that it was possible to look at the universe in ways fundamentally different from the typical human worldview. They were difficult to understand but ultimately comprehensible, once we grasped the alien nature of their perceptions.

The Web taught us to redefine the very nature of our understanding of what intelligence is.

—
Report given before the

Imperial Xenosophontology Institute,

Kyoto, Nihon

D
R
. D
AREN
C
AMERON

C
.
E
. 2572

“Hit them!” Kara yelled over the tactical commo link.
“Hit them!”

She triggered a bolt of blue-white lightning, sending the charge lancing across a kilometer of open ground and into a close-packed cluster of fast-moving, robotic shapes. Chunks of metal flew, spinning lazily. Other warstriders joined in as the Phantoms dropped into a broad, double circle nearly ten kilometers across, each member of the recon force several hundred meters from his or her neighbor, weapons and sensors facing outward. Lightnings flared around the circle, punctuated by the shrill hiss and thunder of volleyed rockets. The attack was developing on all sides with a speed that Kara could scarcely credit.

“Overwatch,” she called, opening the command frequency. “This is Spearpoint. Are you getting this?”

“Looking right over your shoulder, Captain,” a woman’s voice answered in her mind. “We’ve got a good feed on all of you. Give us ten minutes down there, if you can!”

“We’ll try to last that long,” Kara replied, the sarcasm giving an edge to her voice. A sudden rush developed on her front, and she swung her particle cannon to cover it, triggering a thundering barrage of manmade lightnings that illuminated the darkling surface of the world in savagely strobing, actinic flashes. Continuing to fire the CP gun, she flashed a mental command to her AI, unfolding the high-velocity rotary cannon from her flank and putting it into action with a buzzsaw shriek. Hypersonic slugs of depleted uranium shredded the hardest metals and composites, flinging metallic debris high into the sky.

As fast as she could smash them, though, more crowded in from behind. She had the impression that those underground tunnels must be pouring new machines onto the surface faster than the Phantoms could destroy them.

“There’s too many of them,” Hochstader warned. She could see him on the magnified image on her screen. His strider, opposite Kara’s on the perimeter and ten kilometers away, was unfolding like a black-petaled flower, revealing the deadly armory encased within. “They’ll overrun us in seconds!”

“Steady, Pel,” she replied over their private channel. “Focus on the job.”

They kept firing.

Machines…

The word was laughably inadequate. The devices gathering in the shadows of the eerie and nightmare-grown towers around them were mechanisms, yes, grown from metal or plastic or polymer-ceramic composites, but the sheer diversity of shapes and sizes and obvious function defied any rational attempt to catalogue or identify. As the first of the Web devices sprinted toward the human line, her overwhelming impression was of a bizarre and wildly varied zoo of insects—glittering, faceted shapes with jointed bodies and spiky or whiplash antennae. Some bristled like porcupines, some were crisply angular, while others were smooth and naked as eggs. Most were small, some literally the size of insects, others the size of Kara’s head, with a sprinkling of a few genuine monsters as big as her warstrider or bigger. Many had legs, ranging in number from two to uncountable ripplings on long, flat things like centipedes, but others levitated on powerful magnetic fields or flew by other means the human team could not identify.

So far, human military and sophontology experts alike had had no luck at all classifying the Web combat machines, or figuring out what they were after. Confederation military slang simply called them “kickers,” after the Nihongo word
kikai,
“machine.”

They seemed to use nanotechnology as did Man, literally growing individual components molecule by molecule. That gave them a high degree of flexibility in their design; a combat machine might fly in space or walk or slither along on glittering, metallic tentacles, or it might do all three… or it might change its own form in order to meet changes in its environment.

Warstrider technology, Kara reflected as she continued sniping at the lead elements of the Web assault before they could move in closer, had borrowed that philosophy from the Web, and from the Naga before them, with combat machines that could change shape and form, color and weaponry to meet changing battle conditions… but the Web machines were still the undisputed masters of that technique. Machines seemed purpose-grown within seconds of a perceived need; existing machines demonstrated a weirdly shifting polymorphism, as though they were able to somehow digest and regrow the substance of their bodies into new shapes on the spot.

Some of those shapes were bizarre almost beyond belief. To her right, what looked like a small sea of quicksilver was flowing over the uneven ground toward the company’s perimeter. It looked like an animated puddle of liquid mercury, its surface a metallic silver and very bright, the whole rippling along the ground in a huge, fast-spreading sheet. At first, she wasn’t even sure it represented a threat. It looked odd, certainly, but there were no weapons, no indication that the thing was attacking.

Then, with devastating suddenness, the pool of quicksilver exploded in great filaments of gleaming metal, rising up high into the air, then arcing down. Warstriders Kearny and Pritchard were caught in the net flung across their machines. Both opened fire, lasers and particle beams sliding across and through the apparently liquid but coherent metal in explosive puffs of vapor… but the liquid reformed and scattered more looping arcs. Where it touched the Naga-hulls of the warstriders, hull metal detonated in fiery bursts and fuming clouds of oily black smoke, the deadly touch dissolving ceramplast and nanoflage surfacing in white flame.

Kara’s sensors were picking up powerful, shifting magnetic fields ahead, the fields animating the liquid metal. Blue lightning played across the surface, and then a bolt of blue-white fire lanced through the protesting atmosphere, striking Kearny’s strider with a devastating concussion and a splatter of melted hull metal. Kara pivoted her own machine to the right, opening fire with every weapon in her strider’s arsenal, slamming a shrieking swarm of M-310 missiles into the thickest part of the quicksilver pool, stabbing and slashing with lasers, particle beams, and rapid-fire cannon. Explosions ripped through the liquid metal, scattering it in gleaming splatters. Kearny’s strider was down, unmoving; Kara’s cockpit readout indicated null function, systems down. Pritchard’s strider was still fighting, some of its weapons obviously knocked off-line, but the lasers and one rapid-fire cannon still in action, blazing away as the tentacles of silver lashed and sparked in dazzling displays of energy.

Kearny was gone… and Dandridge and Fontaine as well, their striders no longer registering as active on her tactical display. More kickers were appearing on her tactical display every second; the damned things appeared to be surging up from underground. Others were descending from space, drawn to this barren world from elsewhere within the Galactic Core.

“Let’s tighten up the perimeter, people,” she called. The circle was already shrinking though, as the remaining striders shifted position to better support one another. She could hear others in the company calling to one another over the tactical links.

“They’re almost to the perimeter over here! Someone give me a hand!”

“Jordy, watch it! On your right at zero-one-five!”

“I’ve got more on sector three.”

“Kuso! They’re coming up out of the ground!”

“This whole planet is some kind of goddamned factory!”

“Hold on, Cyn! I’m on it!”

“I’m hit! I’m hit! Kuso! There’s too gokking many of them!”

Kara’s AI rasped warning… too late. Something struck her strider, a savage, jolting blow that gouged a kilogram or two of Naga-hull from her dorsal-left surface and left her hivel cannon a useless, partially disemboweled wreck. She didn’t feel pain as such with the blow—the bioelectronic linkage between her brain and the strider’s artificial intelligence was not designed to transmit pain—but the shock was jarring nonetheless, both physically and emotionally. It staggered her, rocking her back on legs and magnetics both. As warning lights cascaded across the viewscreen opened in her mind, she decided that the ability of individual Web machines to repair themselves would be pretty damned useful; her hivel cannon was dead, and with it three important sub-circuit networks in her fire control array. The Naga segments that composed part of her hull and working systems had a limited self-repair capability, including regrowing damaged electronic circuits, but this was beyond their scope.