Semper Human (5 page)

That had been nearly four hundred years earlier, and the technology had improved since then. A strikepod couldn't go up against a capital ship, but it was fast, maneuverable, and damned hard to track, which made it a key component in the modern Marine arsenal. They could also be handled remotely, in certain circumstances, which could be a real advantage.

At the moment, Garwe and fifteen other Marines, each wearing an RS/A-91 strikepod, were approaching the Hassetas floatreef, which filled the sky ahead of them.

One of the genuine shocks of galactic exploration had been the discovery that even gas giants like Sol's Jupiter could harbor life. True, in an atmosphere that was mostly hydrogen, with no solid surface, with fierce electromagnetic radiation belts, and with wind speeds that could approach six or seven hundred kilometers per hour, that life was going to be radically
different
from anything humans were familiar with.

But being different had kept them undiscovered by the Xul and other predators.

Dac IV's native civilization had arisen from a close symbiosis between two evolving life forms—the Krysni and the Reefs.

The Reef was a vast bubble of tough but extremely light tissue, thirty kilometers or more across, and from a distance appearing as insubstantial as a soap bubble. Hanging below like rain shadow beneath a thunderhead was the living part of the Reef, a kind of aerial jungle growing on and within the tangled mass of tentacles trailing beneath the main gas bag. Exothermic chemistries heated the hydrogen within the gas bag, providing lift; hydrogen jets provided some directional movement, enough, at any rate, to let the vast creature steer clear of downdrafts that would drag it into the ferociously hot, high-pressure depths of the atmosphere.

Within the floatreef's remote evolutionary past, the tentacles would have evolved to capture smaller, more maneuverable fliers passing through the reef's shadow. Now, they were an immense and inverted forest providing habitats for tens of thousands of species. Hanging among the thicker tentacles were feeder nets, sheets of closely woven tentacle-threads that filtered organic material out of the atmosphere. Modern floatreefs were skygrazers, inhaling clouds of sulfur-and zphosphorus-rich, locust-sized drifters called
irm
, the Dac equivalent of plankton or krill in distant Earth's oceans.

It was an evolutionary panorama relatively common throughout the Galaxy. A majority of Jovian-type gas giants possessed life, it had turned out, and the environmental constraints required that life to follow more or less similar patterns of form and function. The ten-kilometer montgolfiers of Jupiter had first been discovered late in the twenty-fourth century.

Far more rarely, gas giant ecosystems evolved intelligence. In Jupiter and most other gas giants, intelligence was an unnecessary luxury; grazers didn't need much in the way of brains to inhale clouds of drifting organics. But in Dac and a few hundred other gas giants discovered so far across the Galaxy, competition, the need to anticipate and avoid
storms and downdrafts, and the elusive nature of local food animals had led to sentience at least as great as that of the extinct great whales of old Earth, and often to minds considerably greater and more powerful.

In Dac, according to the mission briefing downloads, there were at least
two
intelligent species living in close symbiosis—the floatreefs themselves and the Krysni.

Lieutenant Marek Garwe hovered vertically now in his Starwraith, half a meter above the deck of the Hassetas visitor tree house. The platform, constructed entirely of materials imported from distant, more solid worlds, was a good two hundred meters across, anchored against one of the major trunk-tentacles, three-quarters shrouded by the tentacle forest, and including a ramshackle assortment of buildings designed to accommodate each of seven or eight major biochemistries. Officially, the tree house was the offworlder compound, the reception center and living quarters for official delegations from other worlds to Dac. Currently, there were 224 visitors to the gas giant, including 57 humans of various species. The offworlders included Associative representatives, cultural liaisons, xenosophontologists and other scientific researchers, and formal diplomats.

Facing the twelve Marine wraiths were some tens of thousands of angry Krysni. Exactly
what
they were angry about had yet to be established. The call from the Dac offworlder compound, though, had been urgent, almost panicky. Four offworlders, all of them humans, had been killed by a sudden rising among the Krysni, and the remainder were terrified that the same was about to happen to them. Anchor Marine Strike Squadron 340 had been deployed from Laridis, some three hundred light years distant, to Tromendet in the Dac IV satellite system two days before. As the situation in the gas giant's upper atmosphere deteriorated, the War Dogs had been ordered in.

The Marines floated above the compound deck, now, facing the tentacle jungle, a near-solid wall of intertwining tubules ranging in size from main trunks nearly a hundred
meters thick to slender threads, writhing and twisting in a constant background of motion. Within the net of tentacles were masses of Dacan—or, more properly, Hassetan—flora: pinkweed, Dacleaf, methane bloom, gas pods, and myriad others, most either orange or purple in color, with smaller amounts of pink and red. And it was within this wall of mottled and rustling vegetation that the Krysni mob had sequestered itself, shrieking in their piping, hydrogen-thin keenings and whistlings, the calls a cacophony of furious invective and hate. What the hell, Garwe wondered, had gotten into the simpleminded creatures?

“Hold your fire,” Captain Xander ordered. “Let's see if they'll talk to us.”

“I don't know, Skipper,” Lieutenant Palin, Blue Five, said. “They don't look very friendly.”

A single Krysni looked a bit like a terrestrial octopus about a meter long, but with a body that expanded or contracted at will like a variable-pressure balloon. Like their huge cosymbiote, the floatreef, they were balloonists, suspended from organic sacs of body-heated hydrogen that let them drift in the upper Dacan atmosphere, their three large, black eyes and cluster of feeding, sensory, and manipulative tentacles dangling below.

Garwe and the other Marines of Blue Flight had downloaded complete work-ups on the Krysni and the floatreefs, of course, as soon as they'd received their mission orders. One line of reasoning held that the Krysni were juvenile floatreefs, but few modern xenosophontologists accepted the notion. There were billions of Krysni, none more than a meter to a meter and a half in length, and perhaps twelve thousand floatreefs scattered through the vastnesses of the upper Dacan atmosphere, none less than ten kilometers across. If the one grew into the other, there ought to be a few intermediate sizes as well.

The likeliest theory was that the two were related but separate species, and that they existed in a close symbiosis. The floatreef took its name from terrestrial coral reefs, not be
cause it looked like one, but because, like a marine reef, it provided a unique and stable habitat for a vast and complex ecology living within and around it. The reef provided food and shelter for the vulnerable Krysni, while the Krysni herded and cultivated the complex zoo of Dacan life within the floatreef's inverted forest, protecting their vast and sapient habitat from attack like sentient white blood cells. While the Krysni could float free, their preferred habitat was within the forest, their float bags flaccid as they used their tentacles to move through the tangle of vegetation and living branches of the undereef.

“This is Captain Xander, Associative Marine Force,” the squadron CO said over the local Net frequency for the compound. “Who's in charge here?”

“I don't think any of us is in charge, exactly…” a voice replied.

“Then you are, now,” Xander replied. “Who are you?”

“Vasek Trolischet,” the voice said. “I'm the senior xenosoph here.”

Blocks of data came up in a window within Garwe's mind, streaming through from the compound's data base. There was a vid, too, of a bald, dark-skinned human male with dazzling golden eyes. No, Garwe corrected himself. Not completely human, but a genegineered subspecies, an s-Human,
Homo sapiens superioris
. And apparently she was female.

Shit, a supie
, one of the Marines broadcast on the squadron backchannel.
Just fucking great
.

“What happened here?” Xander asked the compound spokesperson.

“I don't know.” The supie's words were clipped, tight, and rapid-fire, as though her time sense had been jacked into overdrive. “The baggies just went crazy! Attacked our research team while they were trying to get language samples, and tossed two of them over the edge! Then a whole mob swarmed in and got two more of our security team before anyone knew what was going on!”

“There had to be a reason,” Xander said, deliberately
transmitting at a slower pace. “Do you have a translation frequency?”

“Yes, but their attempts at communication are still quite scrambled. Our heuristic algorithms are necessarily incomplete.”

Garwe had to pull a definition for “heuristic” from his implant AI, and even then wasn't sure he understood how the person was using the word. The damned supies enjoyed talking above the heads of others, especially norms, and scuttlebutt around the barracks had it that they liked flaunting their so-called superiority.

An astronomical IQ hadn't stopped this one from getting into bad trouble, though. The Krysnis were beginning to advance over the tree house deck, inflating their bodies to taut, pale-blue bubbles over a meter across and drifting slowly toward the Marine line.

“Hold your fire,” Xander repeated. “I don't think they're armed.”

“They have
lots
of arms, Skipper,” Lieutenant Malleta said, the nervousness in his voice at odds with the attempt at a joke. There were hundreds of the creatures in a mass in front of the Marines, now, their inflated bodies bumping and jostling with one another as they drifted forward.

“Halt!” Xander barked, speaking Standard, but the transmission translated to a sharp chirp by the translation algorithm from the compound. It sounded, Garwe thought, like the unpleasant squeak of a couple of rubber balloons rubbed together.

“Hey, Captain?” Lieutenant Bollan asked. “Those things are full of hydrogen, right? If we shoot 'em—”

“Use your head, Bollan,” Xander replied. “There's no oxygen in the air to burn. No fire. No hydrogen explosion, okay?”

“Oh, yeah. Right.”

Garwe had been thinking about that unpleasant possibility as well, and was able to relax a bit. The captain was right.
Shoot one of those gas bags with an electron arc and the thing might pop, but it wouldn't go up in flames. The entire ecosystem within this world's atmosphere relied on metabolic processes that took in methane and ammonia, metabolized them for carbon and the nitrogen, and gave off hydrogen. Oxygen was present, but only as a part of trace chemical compounds like water vapor, carbon dioxide, or sulfuric or nitric acids. Fires needed
free
oxygen to burn, and that just wasn't going to happen in the reducing atmosphere of a gas giant.

The mass of Krysni continued to drift forward. “
Shoot
them, Xander!” the s-Human was shouting over the link. “
Shoot
the little gasbag smuggers!”

An indicator light went on in Garwe's in-head display, indicating that Lieutenant Sanders was charging his primary weapon; a thought would trigger it. “Belay that, Sanders!” Xander snapped. “All of you! Primaries on safe!”

Reluctantly, Garwe safed his weapons. Marine battlepods
should
be strong enough to protect them from anything this crowd could throw at them.

Starwraith design, actually, was based on the robotic combat machines developed by the Xul. Normally the outer surface was smooth and unadorned, marked only by a dozen or so randomly placed lenses of various optical and electronic scanners. At need, Garwe could extrude a number of manipulative tentacles, heavier graspers, or weapons, the members growing out of the pod's surface through nanotechnic hull flow and controlled directly by his thoughts. The pod was actually extraordinarily plastic, capable of assuming a wide range of shapes limited only by its total mass of about two hundred kilos, and the need to maintain a roughly human-sized and-shaped inner capsule to protect the wearer/pilot.

Each pod also possessed a number of high-tech defense systems, and Marine training included long hours of practice in the pod-encased equivalent of hand-to-hand combat.

Again, Xander addressed the crowd. “You are trespassing
on diplomatic territory!” she called, the translation going out as shrill chirps and whistles. “Leave this area at once! Return to your reef—”

And then the jostling, bumping mob surged forward, each Krysni launching itself on a jet of hot hydrogen.

And the Battle of Hassetas had begun.

2101.2229

Associative Marine Holding Facility 4
Eris Orbital, Outer Sol System
1858 hours, GMT

“According to this,” Garroway said aloud, “the Xul have been caught counterinfecting our nets. How long has
that
been going on?” He opened his eyes, emerging from the sensory and data immersion of his new implant.

“A couple of centuries at least,” Schilling told him. “It's been exploratory stuff, mostly, as if they weren't quite sure who or what we were.”

“Nonsense! The bastards were at
war
with us….”

“From our point of view, General, yes. But not from theirs.”

“Wait a sec, Captain. I'm missing something here. How could the bastards be waging an interstellar war and not be aware of it?”

Schilling cocked her head. “Just how much did your age know about the Xul, General?”

The bulkheads of the Memory Room were at the moment set to display a panorama of the Galaxy as viewed from somewhere just outside and above the main body. Garroway couldn't tell if it was a high-resolution computer-generated image, or an actual camera view from out in the halo fringe,
but either way it was breathtakingly beautiful. The soft glow of four hundred billion stars shone behind Schilling's head, a radiant corona of stardust.

Watch yourself, Trevor,
he told himself.
You've just been hibed for way too long
.
A pretty girl, romantic lighting
…

Then he wondered if he'd just transmitted that thought. This new hardware was going to take some getting used to.

If Schilling had mentally heard him, she gave no sign. She merely watched him, backlit by the eternal curves of the galactic spiral arms, waiting.

“The Xul?” he said. “Not a lot about their origins, really. Uploaded mentalities. They must have been a technic civilization like us, once, but at some point they embraced a kind of immortality by turning themselves into patterns of data—software, really—running on their computer networks. The xenosoph theory I was taught was that when they were biologicals, before they even achieved sentience, they evolved a hyper-Darwinian survival tactic—an extreme racial xenophobia that led them to wipe out
anyone
who might be or might become a threat. And when they uploaded themselves, they took with them their hardwired xenophobia. And that turned out to be the answer to the Fermi Paradox.”

Schilling nodded. “We know it as the ‘Galactic Null Set Problem.' The Galaxy apparently empty of technic civilization.”

“Okay. Before we got off of our world, though, we didn't know what the answer was. There were lots of possible explanations. Maybe civilizations routinely destroyed themselves as they developed bigger and badder weapons. Maybe the only way to survive for millions of years was to develop a completely static, non-expansive culture that stayed on the home planet contemplating its collective navel. Maybe all of the rest simply never developed technology as we understand it, or never moved out of the Stone Age. Or, just maybe, we humans were the first, the
only
civilization to make it to the stars.” He shrugged. “
Somebody
had to be the first.”

“And then we found out we
weren't
the first.”

“Right. Ancient ruins on Earth's moon, on Mars, on the earthlike worlds of nearby stars. And, buried beneath the ice covering one of Jupiter's moons, we found The Singer. A Xul huntership, trapped in the Europan world-ocean for half a million years. And eventually we
did
encounter other civilizations. But apparently the Xul had been hovering over the entire Galaxy for…I don't know. A million years?”

“We think at least ten million, General.”

“Okay, ten million years. So the Xul are sitting out there in their network nodes, just listening. When a radio signal suggestive of technic life comes in, they would trace it back to the source and smack the planet with a high-velocity asteroid.

“You people will be more up on this stuff than me. But we know a kind of Galactic Federation of beings we called the ‘Builders' or the ‘Ancients' were genegineering
Homo sapiens
and terraforming Mars half a million years ago, and had built planetwide cities on Chiron and a number of other extrasolar worlds. Along came the Xul and—” Garroway slapped the back of his hand, as though swatting a mosquito. “The Builders were wiped out. Then about ten thousand years ago, an enterprising interstellar empire had enslaved much of humankind and set themselves up as the gods of ancient Sumeria. Along came the Xul and—” He slapped his hand again. “And apparently the Xul have been doing this for most of their history, and across most of the Galaxy. Now tell me how they could do that and
not
be waging war against us and every other emergent technological civilization in the Galaxy.”

“When you hit your hand just now, General…like you were swatting a fly?”

“Yes.”

“When you swat a fly, are you at war with it?”

Garroway thought about this. “Oh. You're saying they're so advanced—”

“Not really,” she told him. “They might've been around for ten million years, but the Xul haven't advanced technologically at anything like our pace. In fact, they're actually
not that far ahead of us in most respects today. We've begun uploading personalities into computers ourselves, did you know?”

He scanned quickly through some of the historical data he'd just downloaded. “Ah…I do now.” His eyebrows arched in surprise. “Shit! Humans who live on the Net. You've given them a species name of their own?”

“
Homo telae
,” she said, nodding. “‘Man of the Web,' which in this case means the electronic web of the Galactic Net. Actually, we learned how to upload minds partly from the Xul, inferring parts of the process from what we knew about their technology, and doing some reverse engineering from captured hunterships. In any case, we can pattern a person now and upload her to a virtual electronic world. Her body can die, but the mind, the personality, everything that made her
her
is saved, and lives on.”

“If you call that living,” Garroway said.

“So far as the uploaded individuals are concerned, they're alive,” she told him.

Almost, he asked her if the uploaded personality really was the same as the living mind. As he saw it, the original mind died with the body; what was saved was a back-up, a replica that, with a complete set of memories, would
think
it was the original…but if that was immortality, it was an immortality that did not in the least help the original, body-bound mind. There's been a lot of speculation about the process, though, back in the thirty-second and thirty-third centuries, he recalled, and some people tended to get pretty animated in their insistence that if the backed-up personality was the same as the original in every respect, it
was
the original.

Garroway had never understood the fine points of the theory, though, and had little patience with philosophy. Evidently, though, speculation had become reality, and enough people had opted for the technique to justify inventing a new species of humanity to describe them. That made sense, he supposed, given that one definition of species was its inabil
ity to interbreed with other species. A member of
Homo telae
, living its noncorporeal existence up on the Net, certainly wasn't going to be able to produce offspring by mating with
Homo sapiens
.

“The point is,” Schilling told him, “the Xul are barely aware of us. Certain parts of the entire Xul body react to us the way your toe might twitch when an ant walks across it, or the way you might swat that fly without really thinking about what you're doing.”

“So the Xul are some kind of group mind, a metamind?” That had been a popular theory about them back in his day.

“Not quite. They seem to function as what we call a CAS, a Complex Adaptive System. That's a very large organization made up of many participants, or agents…like termite communities in Earth, or a hurricane.”

“You're saying they're not intelligent? They build
starships
, for God's sake!”

“There are different kinds of intelligence, remember. Individual Xul may be what we think of as intelligent beings, but for the most part they're locked into their virtual worlds and unaware of what we would call
real
. The group-Xul presence, the meta-Xul, if you will, is more an expression of the original Xul instincts, their xenophobia in particular. Even their construction of starships is probably completely automated by now—we've never found a Xul shipyard, remember—or they may all be relics of a much earlier age.”

“But…we've eavesdropped on them, Captain. We know they have us catalogued as a threat. They know our home world…hell, they
bombarded
Earth in 2314. How can they not be aware of us?”

“We've been sending our AI probes into Xul nodes for almost two thousand years, now, and we've done a lot of listening. There are…call them different levels of awareness. One Xul node might learn about us, but they were always slow to share with the others. Together, they were still driven by their original xenophobia, but taken in isolation,
individual nodes don't seem to really be conscious. Most of their defenses are automated. We know that within one node, or aboard one starship, they arrive at decisions through a kind of chorus of thoughts and counterthoughts until they reach a consensus.”

“The Singer,” he put in. “Europa.”

“Exactly. But individual Xul nodes tend to be pretty isolated from one another—minimum internodal communication across a widely distributed net—and the Galaxy is too big to allow that kind of consensus on a specieswide scale. From the point of view of the species, of the CAS, they're all blissfully living a near-eternal existence in their own virtual universe, and once in a while we run across their toe and make it twitch.”

“That…is a rather uncomfortable image,” Garroway said slowly. He'd been more comfortable thinking of the Xul as a conventional enemy, an interstellar empire seeking to exterminate Humankind. The mental picture Schilling invoked was of something much, much larger, more powerful, and potentially far more dangerous than a mere alien interstellar empire. The fact that the Xul as a Galaxy-wide CAS hadn't yet put all the pieces together implied that some day they would.

If the Xul ever got their act together and thought and moved as a species, there might be little that Humankind could do to fight back.

“As we understand the Xul now,” Schilling told him, “most of their original uploaded mentalities, the governing choruses, are…aware of what goes on outside their virtual worlds, but not really a part of it, do you see? The minds that control their hunterships and probes, the minds we've been up against in combat, all of those are either copies of the original minds, or AI.”

“Artificial intelligence. What's the difference between an uploaded electronic mind and an artificial one?”

“Good question. Maybe none. The two may be completely
interchangeable within what passes for Xul society. Especially when the ability to upload a conscious mind brings with it the ability to
copy
a conscious mind, to replicate it as often as needed, and to tweak it, to change it from iteration to iteration.”

“So the original Xul minds form the basis of the AI infrastructure, but they fill in with copies and AIs.” He was still thinking about it in classical military terms. No matter how many casualties humans inflicted on the Xul, they could fill in the gaps in an eye's blink, simply by running off more copies of themselves.

“We believe so.”

“How the hell do you fight an enemy like that?”

“Well, we've been using our own AI assault complexes to take down Xul nodes as we discover them. They're programmed to integrate themselves with the Xul AI software within a target node and gradually take it over, substituting our own virtual reality for theirs.”

“Really?” The concept was intriguing.

“So far as the Xul minds within the target node are aware, everything's going fine, they've stamped out all possible threats to their existence, and there's nothing out there to upset their poor, xenophobic sensibilities. They get routine—and negative—reports from their probes and listening stations, routine comm traffic from other nodes, everything's fine. And our AIs are in a position to intercept any incoming data that says otherwise, or be aware of any decision by the node's chorus to go out looking for trouble. They could even shut the node down completely, if need be. Literally cut their power and turn them off.”

“Why don't you? Turn them all off, I mean.”

She looked uncomfortable. “Genocide, you mean.”

“If it's a matter of survival for Humankind…yes.”

“We can't do that!”

“Why not? I'm not even sure electronic uploads qualify as
life
.”

“Members of
Homo telae
would object to that, General. So would most members of our AI communities.”

“But their survival is at stake, too, damn it!” He felt exasperation building up, threatening to emerge as raw fury. How could he make her understand? No Marine he knew liked the idea of wholesale genocide, but when your back was up against the wall, you did what you
had
to do to survive.

She sighed. “That…option is debated from time to time. It comes up from time to time as a possible strategy. But there's a strong egalatist faction within the Associative government—”

“‘Egalatist?'”

“All intelligence is equally valid, no matter what the shape of the body that houses it. And many Associative species—many human religious factions, too—think the Xul are a legitimate sapient life form, and that wiping them out is the same as genocide.”