Rebellion (20 page)

Theoretically, with each combat encounter, Self—the massive, growing Self still safely hidden within the womblike embrace of Mother Rock
—
would learn, acquiring skills, reflexes, even weapons from the not-Self opponents the individual »selves« met and defeated. Those skills and memories had to be returned to Self first, however, before they could be reproduced and disseminated throughout all future, budding »selves«, and so far in this cycle, no »self« had survived the encounter to return to Self with its prize of knowledge. »Self« was thrown into combat, completely unprepared. Seconds after reaching the Void, a searing blast of coherent radiation had slashed along the still-unformed side of the defender-form. Half of »self’s« organic units had died, shriveling in white heat unlike anything it had ever before sensed.

It was quiet now, the battle swirling to other parts of the Void. »Self« clung to the wall of the Void, fearful that at any moment it might be flung from the Rock and into that disconcerting emptiness that gaped above and around it. It understood gravity as direction rather than as a force; to its senses, »self« seemed to be hanging, suspended at the edge of a precipice, in immediate danger of dropping into the Void.

The feeling passed, but slowly. The direction leading toward Mother Rock, toward warmth, security, and the yearned-for reunion with the fully sentient glory of Self, seemed somehow to be holding »self«, leechlike, to the surface of Rock. Eventually, »self« dared to move, inching back toward the not-Rock crevasse through which it had emerged into this terrible, disconcerting space.

To »self’s« perceptions, the Void was not empty; true vacuum would have been incomprehensible. Void was a sea of energy, of magnetic lines of force and of electromagnetic radiations, most of which seemed to originate with a diffuse mass of heat and radio noise suspended within the not-Rock gulf. Trembling, »self« tasted its strange surroundings, detecting familiar elements but in unfamiliar guises
—
oxygen as a gas, for instance, instead of as part of solid chemical compounds. Most common of all was molecular nitrogen
—
rare in the depths of Mother Rock, but present here as fully four-fifths of the Void’s chemical composition. When Self ate new cavities for itself within the deep Rock, the not-Rock that remained usually consisted of carbon dioxide and various other carbon- and sulfur-compound gases, the products of Self’s metabolism.

Movement was difficult, hampered by the damage. Part of »self« had not completed the transition from rock threader to defender, and the machine-life shell was trapped now between the two, unable to return to the Rock, unable to defend. It would have to heal itself before it could move far. Worst was the loss of its own organic body mass. That would have to be replaced, and quickly. Fortunately, pods bearing more amputated fragments of Self were nearby, rising from Rock, dispersing into Void on magnetic winds.

»Self« recognized »self« and called out to it.…

Chapter 16

Xenophobe psychology is patterned on their physiology, with a kind of hierarchy of organization. At the bottom are individual units—football-sized blobs of jelly made of an intriguing mix of organic cells and inorganic… call them machines, cell-sized structures representing an organically based nanotechnology that gives the Xenophobes an adaptability that we can only guess at. So, too, is the Xeno concept of “Self” organized into layers, the combined experiences and perceptions of many separate Nodes capable of joining together as a self-aware whole.

—from a report given before the

Hegemony Council on Space Exploration

Devis Cameron

C.E.
2542

The VK-141 Stormwind descended toward the clearing on screeching, ducted jets, lashing the surrounding trees into a hurricane frenzy. The ascraft shuttle, registered with the Babel militia, was one of a handful of transports used by the rebel forces. Katya, cocooned inside the Ghostrider clamped to one of the craft’s external rider slots, waited until they were two meters from the ground, then gave the mental command that broke the connections between ascraft and strider. She dropped free, landing with a heavy thud. Vic Hagan’s RLN-90 Scoutstrider dropped seconds later, a few meters away.

Most ascraft possessed external cargo bays, called riderslots because they could be adapted to carry striders in magnetic grapples, tucked away beneath the vehicle’s delta wings. Stormwinds had four, two to either side, but only two were filled on this run.

If this crazy idea didn’t work. Katya had argued, then four striders would be no advantage over two… and the rebels would lose only two of their precious combat machines.

“Okay, Lara,” she called over the general frequency. “We’re down, all green.”

“Copy that, and I’m out of here,” the ascraft pilot shot back. “Call when you need your dust-off. Good luck, you two.” With a gathering roar, the Stormwind lifted above the clearing, pivoted until it was facing southeast, then accelerated, streaking away just above the treetops.

It was a calculated risk, of course, conducting an ascraft strider drop less than thirty kilometers from Babel, where their activities might be noticed by the always-present watching eyes at synchorbit, directly overhead. It was unlikely that they’d be noticed, however. Right now, all HEMILCOM eyes would be focused on Site Red One, where the Xenophobes had broken through the surface scant hours before, overwhelmed the defensive line, and begun chewing their way east through the jungle, arrowing straight for the Babel towerdown.

“We’d better start moving, Vic,” she called. She rotated her optics slowly, studying their surroundings. The clearing was an old storm blowdown, and the footing was treacherous even for warstriders. “I make it three-one-three. Looks like I’d better break trail.”

“Roger that, Captain. After you.”

Their steps were slowed by the tangle of vegetation underneath. There was supposed to be a path here, the remnants of a seventy-year-old logging road, but Eriduan flora, beneath the high-energy light of an F7 sun, proliferated, grew, and even moved with a most unplantlike haste. Numerous Nomad trees had migrated from the higher slopes in search of moister ground, and the ubiquitous anemone plants had sprouted everywhere. The trail, its topography downloaded into her RAM by Creighton back at Emden base, was no longer there.

Its loss would slow them, but there was no danger of becoming lost. Site Red One had been carefully mapped and plotted, its coordinates downloaded to their cephlinks. Katya could check the navdata displayed across one corner of her visual field and see that Red One was now some twelve kilometers away…
that
way.

They’d heard the news at the rebels’ Emden base last night: early-warning sound detectors at Red One had detected a large number of Xenophobe tunnelers a scant few hundred meters beneath the ground, pinpointing their probable breakout point. A military alert had been sounded, and both the organic and robotic defenders of the crater itself brought to peak readiness. From the ground recordings tracking the rumbling DSA, this would be no isolated breakthrough but an all-out assault, probably aimed at Babel and the space elevator.

That added a note of deadly urgency to the op. For the moment, at least, the Rebellion was on hold, as the Network rebels joined Babel’s defenders. Armed revolution might be necessary for Sinclair’s “explosion of diversity,” but for human diversity to have any chance at all the humans had to survive, whether they were Hegemony colonists, placard-waving demonstrators, or Imperial Marines.

The Eriduan Network was continuing its covert activities, of course, but the overtly military units—and the men and women like Creighton who remained with the Hegemony’s garrison forces—all reacted as they’d been trained, deploying to meet the suddenly emerging threat in the jungle west of Babel.

There was, of course, some question as to whether rebel military forces could join in Babel’s defense without attracting Imperial notice. The easiest means of handling the problem was for them to pass themselves off as loyal militia units. Every city on Eridu had at least one small, locally raised self-defense force, and since the exact number of operational warstriders fluctuated daily with breakdowns, repairs, and conversions, not even the vast HEMILCOM AI systems at Eridu Synchorbital could list or track them all with any degree of accuracy.

Katya, however, had suggested an alternative.

The appearance of Xenophobes near Babel gave the Network the opportunity it had been looking for, the chance to find an isolated Xenophobe machine, possibly one damaged in battle, and use the comel to try to establish contact with its operators. If the Xenophobes could be reached, could be made to understand what was at stake, a kind of alliance might be struck, something along the lines of
Help us fight our war, and if we win, we’ll find a way to share this world with you in peace.…

Katya had argued that her experience made her the logical choice to go. She still wasn’t sure why she’d insisted on that point with such fire. Partly, she realized as she guided her LaG-42 across the sharply sloping ground through the patterns of golden light spilling through the forest canopy, it had to do with Dev, almost as though her success in contacting the Xenos for the Confederation would atone for Dev’s working for the Hegemony, for the damage he’d done to the Winchester Network.

Too, there were still so many unknowns, right down to the question of whether or not acquisitive-phase Xenos could even be reasoned with. Katya had virtually appropriated the idea of trying direct contact for herself, and she damn well wasn’t going to send others out to shake hands with Xenos while she stayed behind.

She concentrated on her footing, her heavier LaG-42 in the lead, pressing through the undergrowth and trampling it down for the lighter Scoutstrider behind her. The ground sloped sharply skyward to her left. The putative trail worked its way crabwise along the flanks of the Pipe Mountains, a thickly wooded spur of the Equatorials that circled west of Babel like a protective wall eight hundred meters high. The jungle was thick, almost impenetrable in places, and heavily shadowed in the lower layers. Eriduan trees were mushroom-shaped, though with caps made of thousands of slender, interlacing fibers instead of a solid mass. Many had three or four levels, the better to trap every scrap of the energetic radiation from Marduk. Beneath them, in the shadows, saprophytic sponge brush and tentacled anemone plants made footing treacherous, even for a warstrider.

She wondered just what they would find waiting for them at Red One.

Vince Creighton had encountered a Xenophobe outside of Winchester several months before, and he’d been able to feed the rebels all of his own briefings on the threat. The Xenos on Eridu appeared to be identical to those she’d encountered on Loki and on the DalRiss homeworlds, shapeshifting Alphas that fragmented into amoebic Gammas when destroyed. So far on Eridu, no human machines had been captured by the Xenos, so none had yet been transformed into the Beta or “Xenozombie” form that utilized a disturbing parody of human technology.

A month after that first Xeno surfacing just outside the capital’s domes, a second had occurred twenty-eight kilometers west of the sky-el and had been destroyed by Babel militia striders rushed to the spot. The 3rd New American Mech Cav had been hurriedly shifted back to Babel to defend against the expected next attack. RoPro walls had been grown, and the robotic defenses put in place. Xenophobes tended to use the same exits from their subterranean highways repeatedly.

That next attack had not materialized, however, until now. For several days, every military unit on Eridu had been on full alert as HEMILCOM tracked the SDTs of Xenophobe Alphas far underground. By the previous evening, it had been a fair certainty that the Xenos would be emerging, and soon, at Red One. Imperial Marines were already being routed to the Babel towerdown, both from other Eriduan cities and from orbit; Xenophobes seemed to be attracted to large masses of metal or artificial composites, and by far the largest such mass on the planet was the towering silver needle of the Babel sky-el. A successful Xeno attack on the space elevator would spell disaster on a cataclysmic scale. Unfortunately, from Babel’s point of view, nukes could not be employed this time. No one wanted to even think about the results if subsurface nukes severed the space elevator’s underground anchors.

As they’d skimmed above the Eriduan Outback toward their drop zone, Katya had listened in on fragments of communication between the ground forces and HEMILCOM. She’d heard the announcement that eight Hegemony striders had landed and were engaging the enemy; minutes later she’d heard the order to fall back. From the sound of things, the Xenos had been left holding the field around Red One. There’d been a call sent out for warships to bombard the crater from orbit; many worlds had large laser batteries mounted in their synchorbital installations, but the only heavy weapons in Eridu orbit at the moment were those of the Imperial destroyer
Tokitukaze,
and those would be employed only as a tactic of last resort. Reportedly, Omigato had already requested both additional warships and more warstrider units to bolster Eridu’s defenses, but it might be weeks before those reinforcements arrived.

According to Katya’s topo download, Henson’s Rise passed the Red One crater less than a kilometer to the west. The human defenses would have concentrated on the crater’s east side, and the retreat would have been toward the east, toward Babel. It was Katya’s plan to move along the crest of the ridge to a point where she could observe the crater itself from above and from the west. No decision about actually attempting to approach the Xenos would be made until she had a clear view of the battlefield.

“Watch it, boss,” Hagan called to her over the tactical link. “I think the trees are thinning up ahead. We’re almost there.”

“Roger that.” Her Ghostrider was in the lead, weapons already armed and ready. “I’m starting to get a background nano count. Point oh-two and rising.”