Netlink (3 page)

The blast caught her from behind, a searing onslaught of gigajoule laser energy that overloaded her struggling external nano coating and melted its way through her hull like a blowtorch through polystyrene. Diacarb alloy vaporized at that deadly caress. Two of her four legs were sheared off in a flash of raw energy. Unbalanced,
Kara’s Matic
pivoted around its attachment to
Philosopher,
Kara tried uploading the mental command to dissolve the nano bond with the other warstrider, but her systems were already in cascade failure, one tripping out the next in a dizzying collapse of all command and control functions. She had time only to glimpse her attackers, a pair of Tsurugis that had managed to slip behind her using the crest of the ridge for cover.

Then her visual field shattered in a burst of static and she was plunged into blackness absolute. She felt the shock as her strider struck the ground, and she wondered if the Imperials would finish her off immediately or leave her where she was, an easy pickup for their legger infantry.

Inside her body now turned coffin, Kara bit off a savage curse. She
hated
being helpless like this, unable to move, unable to defend herself or even see outside her near-dead warstrider.

Her only chance now was to wake up… and she quickly began uploading the commands that would make that possible.…

Chapter 2

It is now recognized that human technological development does not proceed in steady waves as was first assumed by the primitive models created at the dawn of modern sociohistory during the mid- to late-twentieth century. Instead, it advances in leaps interspersed with long periods of null growth. Technology feeds itself, one advance spawning others in quick succession, but such a pace cannot endure for long. Humans require time to assimilate the resultant changes to their environment.

A prime example of rapid advancement, of course, is the period immediately after the Confederation Rebellion when, in the space of a few decades, contact with alien species propelled Humanity into an entirely new technological milieu.

—
Man and Immortality

D
R
. R
OBERT
F
ISK

C
.
E
. 2567

At least, she thought of it as waking up. The sensations of a linkage disconnect were much the same, with a moment’s disorientation as her brain adjusted itself to new input, similar to the groggy and somewhat confused
where am I
of waking from a dream that had seemed more real than reality. Her surroundings were at once strange and familiar, a close, almost coffinlike enclosure lit solely by the wan gleam of a systems status board in the padding near her head. Now that her bodily sensations were no longer being filtered out by the link, she ached all over, as she always did after a long session piloting a strider. Had her strider been configured as a warflyer, her lifepod would have been filled with a gel to cushion her body against the brutal accelerations demanded by space combat. As it was, even strapped into the pod’s liquid-filled rider couch, she had been left bruised and sore by the shocks and jolts of the past few moments.

Reaching up to her face she unstrapped her LS mask. Theoretically, both her life support needs and her physical connection with the warstrider’s AI could be provided solely by her Companion, of course, but even the most rabid Nagaphiles rarely staked
everything
on a half kilogram of symbiotic alien nanogoo.

The status board gave light enough to see. Raising her left hand in front of her face, palm up, she concentrated. Her Companion, already sensing her purpose, began emerging almost at once.

Companions were the biotechnic descendents of the Naga-links and cornels of two decades before, living bits of Naga tissue that vastly extended the range of human-machine interfaces, generating an astonishing revolution in human societies from the Core Worlds to the Frontier. Kara’s Companion formed a lump in the palm of her hand, tar-black in the uncertain red-tinted light. A larger mass flowed from the back of her skull onto her shoulder, connected to the first by a thread-slender strand emerging through the skin of her arm and the slick plastic fabric of her skinsuit. The process was painless, almost unfelt save for a feather-light brushing sensation against her skin; individual Companion cells were only slightly larger than the mitochondria of Kara’s cells, so tiny and compactly organized that they could slip right through the skin, tissue, even bone of their human hosts and not disturb a single nerve.

The original Nagas encountered by humans had been huge, as massive as a good-sized planetoid. In their native state, they could be thought of as living nanotech, vast masses of specialized and interconnected cells that absorbed rock and broke it down virtually atom by atom. With human guidance, they could manufacture nearly anything. There were cases on record of inquisitive Nagas so completely patterning injured humans that they’d been able to rebuild them, literally molecule by molecule, and they’d vastly improved on the genetically engineered biotechnic links humans had used to communicate with the alien DalRiss.

A Naga was composed of uncountable trillions of individual “paracells,” each massing a kilogram or two and, when free of its parent, bearing a disturbing resemblance to a shiny black slug the size of someone’s head. “Domesticated” Nagas had learned to bud off smaller and more protean pieces of themselves, creating the Companions. Like their paracell precursors, Companions had no intelligence to speak of on their own; Kara found it convenient to think of them as non-AI computers, capable of storing and manipulating vast amounts of data and, when linked to her own brain, able to greatly extend her own intelligence and abilities.

Within moments, her Companion had left her body completely, save for a tiny percentage of itself still lodged within Kara’s brain, connected to the rest by an almost invisible thread emerging from the back of her head and penetrating her skull unfelt, a lifeline to help it find its way home. The main body of the Companion, its orders already downloaded, reached with pulsing, amoebic ripplings up off her shoulder and slid into the red-lit console.

The warstrider had its own nano for damage control, but its programming wasn’t up to this level of DC. Through her Companion, however, Kara could initiate repairs with more control and with a better understanding of just what was going on inside her vehicle.

An expansion of the idea of human-Naga symbiosis, Companions were fast proving to be the gateway to a radically new way of thinking about tools, about Man, about the universe itself. For centuries, human-machine interfaces had required one or more metal and ceramic receptacles surgically embedded in a person’s head. Computers, ViReality feeds, and other cephlink technologies were accessed by jacking a plug into neck or head sockets. Low-level connections could be made through palm implants, nanogrown traceries of wires and contact plates usually embedded at the heel of the person’s thumb on his nondominant hand.

Within the Hegemony—the Imperium-dominated collection of national and world governments that spanned most of human-colonized space—how many sockets a person had was a mark of states, since only three-socket jackers could be guaranteed full employment jacking equipment, vehicles, or spacecraft. As part of its welfare program, Earth’s government provided free palm interfaces that allowed people to carry out monetary transactions and download government entertainment feeds. In the Frontier, though, things were a bit more freewheeling, but even there sockets were necessary if you wanted to get anywhere in life. And cephlink implants, grown by injections of specially programmed nano that plated out within the sulci of the brain and in the feeds to surgically implanted external sockets, were expensive.

Companions, however, were cheap, self-reproducing half-kilo lumps of living Naga tissue extruded by a planetary Naga that had already had contact with humans. Alive but almost certainly not intelligent or even self-aware, a Companion could slip through the tissues of its human host to achieve an intimate physical interconnectivity with the brain exactly as had the nanoplated layers of metal and plastic in the older style cephlink implants. Instead of having permanently attached sockets, a person with a Naga Companion could form as many sockets as necessary, of any size or capacity, simply by willing it; at a thought, part of the skin would refashion itself, in seconds extruding the necessary hardware.

Not everyone, of course, had embraced this new biotechnology. Too many still remembered the Naga as Xenophobes, the mindless destroyers of the colonies at An-Nur, Herakles, and Lung Chi. Others were simply unable to even consider opening their bodies to an alien life-form,
a parasite,
even if it resembled a lump of tar more than a living organism. Most Japanese, Kara understood, considered such symbiosis to be filthy, akin to rolling around in excrement.

But for those who weren’t disgusted by the idea of forming a partnership with the things, Naga Companions were already transforming the way people did business, exchanged credit, or jacked in for entertainment, work, or education. If the Core Worlds were slow to accept Companions, the Confederation had adopted them with an almost passionate enthusiasm. Possibly, Kara thought, the fact that the Confederation had won its independence from the Imperial Shichiju only twenty-five years before—the two were still engaged in almost constant skirmishing and raiding—had something to do with it.

Already, the economies and the industrial infrastructures of New America and the other Confed worlds had been transformed. A new attitude was sweeping the Frontier, one due largely to the influx of alien biotechnology. B-tech, it was called, the blending of human nanotechnology—the manipulation of individual molecules and atoms on the nanometer scale—with the DalRiss understanding of biological systems and controlled evolution, and the Naga ability to pattern and change living materials literally atom by atom. A host of new products had appeared within the past few decades, products that had changed the way people looked at themselves… and the ways they presented themselves to others. Naga Companions had already changed nearly everything about how New Americans did business, from the use of information—bytes of data—as a currency base to the ability to transform their faces and bodies into things of pure fancy and fantasy.

Kara closed her eyes, concentrating on the information trickling back down the living thread from her Companion. Her fusorpack, as expected, was off-line and it would take time to build up power enough to recharge its containment fields, but there were substantial reserves yet in her batteries. A short circuit had melted the battery power feeds and fried the control circuitry. She uploaded a series of thoughts to her Companion, directing it to begin emergency repairs. With the bionanotechnological wizardry of its Naga parent, it would be able in a few seconds to regrow new circuitry from the carbonized remains of the old as easily as it could reshape Kara’s skin texture and conductivity.

Repairs had only just begun, however, when her strider lurched hard, rolling to the side, and Kara clutched at the edge of her couch, staring with alarm at the padded inner curve of her life-support pod centimeters above her head. Had that been a near-miss, an explosion close beside her strider, or was one of the Tsurugis investigating her damaged machine? Damn, if she only had windows.…

Another lurch, a jolt that nearly tipped her over, but then the pod dropped back, rocking heavily before coming to rest, tilted nose-high. The insulation qualities of layered diacarb and ceramplast were superb, but she still could hear the faint rumble of thunder, the shriek of PAC bolts. It sounded like a pitched battle being waged, close by the ravine where Dolan’s and her war-striders had fallen.

Who, she wondered, was going to win? Not just this battle, but this ongoing war between Confederation and Empire. The
chi
-war, the New American news medes were calling it, from
chiisai,
the Nihongo word for little. Little war it might have been, minor raids for the most part, with the occasional ship seizure or act of sabotage; certainly, though, it was large enough for the men and women it killed. This raid—Operation Sandstorm, some wit had dubbed it—was supposed to be of supreme importance, though no one had told Kara yet the why of the thing. This world was not exactly an easy mark; the Imperials called it Kasei, but most people on the Frontier knew it by its Anglic name.

Mars.

A Confederation raid against an Imperial research complex on old Mars, right next door to Earth itself, was bound to escalate the
chi
-war to something larger. She just hoped to hell that whatever the Phantoms were supposed to grab here was worth the cost.

And the
risk.

The political situation was so damned confused just now. The Confederation had won its short, sharp war of independence with the Empire twenty-five years ago, but victory had not brought security. Confederation, Periphery, Frontier… names giving substance to a lie. A quarter of a century ago, perhaps, the Confederation had been unified, an alliance of frontier worlds fighting against the Shichiju, but even in victory that alliance had already been crumbling.

Theoretically—at least according to the history ViRsims—New America, Rainbow, Liberty, and a handful of other worlds had forged a new government, one based on Libertarian ideals now virtually extinct among the crowded dependencies and nation states and Fukushi protectorate arcologies of old Earth. Under the leadership of Travis Sinclair and a few other visionaries, freedom had been wrested from the Empire by sheer grit, determination, and a will to be free of Earth and its heavy-handed Hegemonic bureaucracy.

Though raised and download-educated on New America, Kara knew that there was a certain amount of self-deceptive propaganda behind that version of history. To begin with, no handful of colonial worlds could have hoped to fight it out with Japan’s military might or with the Japanese-backed government of the Terran Hegemony and long survive. Shichiju, the Nihongo word for Man’s interstellar realm, meant “Seventy,” and in fact, the Hegemony had ruled more than seventy worlds at its height. Only about twenty of those worlds—all thinly populated, possessing limited resources and few ships, and located far from the Shichiju’s heart—had openly broken with Earth and joined the Confederation rebellion. Japan had held a ruthless monopoly over K-T drive technology and the techniques necessary for building large starships for too long for the newcomer upstarts of the Frontier to be able to challenge them in open war. For the most part, the Confederation’s strategy had been to make Japan’s inevitable victory too expensive to pursue. At that, luck had more to do with their independence than military prowess—luck… and their communication with two separate alien species, still the only nonhuman cultures known to Man.