Semper Human (6 page)

“Hell,” Garroway said. “The bastards have tried to pull the plug on humans often enough in the past few thousand years. Maybe we should pull the plug on them. This is
war
.”

“The concept of
war
may be out of date, General,” Schilling said. “If we can contain the Xul without switching them off…wouldn't that be better? Especially if we can eventually find a way to reason with them? Cure their xenophobia, and bring them into the Associative?”

Garroway wasn't sure he liked the sound of that. “Maybe….”

“The Xul aren't
evil
,” Schilling said. “Very, very different, yes. And they have a worldview that makes it tough to reason with them on human terms. But they would have a lot to contribute to Associative culture.”

“Listen, if you people are so all-fired eager to make friends with those things, why'd you bring me out of cold storage?”

“Because the containment may be failing,” Schilling said. “We have intelligence from several sources that suggests that, just as we've been infiltrating their systems electronically, they've been infiltrating ours.

“And just the possibility that they've begun reacting to us coherently has scared the shit out of some of us….”

Hassetas, Dac IV
Star System 1727459
1901 hours, GMT

The Krysni mob, a wall of gas bags and writhing tentacles, lunged toward the Marine line. Garwe saw a telltale warning wink on within his in-head displays, and read the data un-scrolling beside it.

“I'm getting a power spike, Captain!” he shouted. “The bastards are
armed
!”

“Weapons free!” Xander called.

With a thunderclap, a searing, violet beam snapped in from the jungle wall to the left, washing across Lieutenant Wahrst's strikepod in coruscating sheets and arcing forks of grounding energy. The smooth surface of her pod silvered, then seemed to flow like water as internal fields and nanotechnics shifted to shunt aside the charge.

The attacking wall of gas bags struck an instant later, carrying the Marines back a few steps by the sheer inertia of their rush. Garwe found himself grappling with half a dozen of the things. They appeared to be trying to grab his pod in their tentacles; he responded by growing tentacles of his own, silver-sheened whiplashes emerging from the active nano surface of his pod.

Odd. The pod's response was a bit sluggish. Garwe's neural interface with the pod's AI and electronic circuitry was supposed to be essentially instantaneous, but either the connection was running slow, or his brain was running way fast. It wasn't enough to cause major problems, but he was painfully aware of the way time seemed to stretch around him as more and more of the Krysni gas bags crowded in close. His hull sensors felt them, a dead weight clinging to his armor, growing more and more massive with each dragging second.

He sent a mental command to his pod's defense system, and the outer surface crackled with electricity. Krysni floaters in contact with his pod shriveled and twisted, their blue-white skins crisping to brown and black in a second or two of arcing fury.

A second high-energy bolt fired from the jungle, catching Captain Xander's pod as she tried to rise above the tangled melee. Her pod shrugged off the attack, but as it rotated away from the sniper, Garwe noticed that a dinner-plate-sized patch of her outer nano had been burned away, leaving a ragged, gray-white scar. If her pod couldn't repair itself before another shot hit in the same spot, she was dead.

Garwe lashed out with his tentacles, burning down another eight or ten of his attackers. Free for the moment, he increased power to his repulsors and moved his pod higher. “Blue One!” he called. “Fall back! You've got a hole burned through your nano!”

As if encouraged by the sniper's partial success, other electron bolts began snapping out of the jungle. Dozens of the Krysni shriveled and fell, or vanished in white puffs of vapor, victims of friendly fire, but the unarmed mob kept moving forward, ignoring casualties from both sides of the battle, trying to overwhelm the twelve Marine battle pods by sheer weight of numbers.

Garwe's pod had already located each enemy shooter and plotted them on his targeting matrix, revealing them on his IHD as flashing, bright red reticules. He selected the one that had hit the captain and triggered his pod's primary weapon, sending a megajoule pulse of X-ray laser energy slashing into the jungle.

Purple and orange vegetation shriveled and died; the Reef's tentacles curled back from the high-energy caress, and the compound's support platform shuddered as the vast life form that was Hassetas reacted to the heat.

“Skipper!” Garwe yelled! “Request permission to disengage! If we can just maneuver—”

“Negative!” Xander snapped back. “We do it by the opplan!”

The opplan—the operations plan downloaded from the squadron's command constellation—required the War Dogs to deploy on the compound platform and provide a kind of barricade for the off-worlders, protecting them from the locals until a transport could make it down from orbit. The Marines would hold the perimeter until the off-worlders could evacuate, then pull out.

Ideally, no shots would have been fired, and the mere presence of the Marine battlepods should have kept the Krysni at bay. Somehow, things hadn't quite worked out that way, however.

Garwe kept firing into the jungle, targeting Krysni power sources as his pod's sensor suite picked them up and flagged them on his in-head display. The off-worlder compound was trembling and bucking now as the floatreef moved the massive, main tentacle to which it was anchored.

“Trolischet!” Xander snapped on the general frequency. “I suggest you get your people off of the compound platform!”

“We
can't
!” Trolischet replied, her voice shrill. “We have no ship!”

“An evacuation ship is inbound,” Xander told her. “ETA less than ten minutes! But you might not
have
ten minutes! You need to get everyone into evacuation pods, fliers, flight-capable suits, whatever you have that will carry you. All you need to do is to get off this damned reef before it decides to scratch!”

“There are over two hundred of us, Captain! We couldn't save more than a quarter!”

“Well, then, save them, damn it! Or you're
all
dead!”

Other Marines were targeting the snipers now as well, those that could still move and had not been completely engulfed by the advancing wall of balloon bodies and angry, lashing tentacles. Garwe pivoted, targeting a second source
of high-energy electron beams, and then three bolts caught him at once, slamming into his Starwraith in a searing detonation of raw energy.

Warning lights winked on in his IHD, his defensive fields flickering and dimming beneath the overload. A half-second later, three more beams struck and his nanodefenses went down, slabs of active nano burned from the Starwraith's outer shell, oily smoke boiling from a puncture in the foametal structure beneath.

Garwe cut his repulsors, dropping back into the relative cover of the tentacle-to-tentacle melee below. His pod jostled and bumped in the press of leathery balloon bodies and lashing tentacles as he rerouted the majority of his power flow to the task of repairing his outer-shell nano. He tried discharging a few thousand volts through what was left of his outer nano, but the attempt brought up more warning lights and no other effect.

The Krysni appeared to be learning quickly. Captain Xander's Starwraith had been hit again repeatedly, and Palin, Mortin, and Javlotel were down as well, large patches of their nanoshells burned and peeled away, exposed portions of their inner armor partly melted under the fierce heat of the enemy fire.

And it was all
wrong
. The two symbiotic sentient species of Dac IV weren't technic, and didn't have manufactured weaponry of any sort. Individual Krysni possessed a biological weapon—a toxin delivered through hollow, pressure-fired barbs like a terrestrial jellyfish—which they used when necessary against some of the mindless predators of Dac IV's deeper atmosphere layers, but those were useless against a Starwraith, even one as badly damaged as Garwe's. And without a solid surface from which to mine and forge metals, indeed, without fire, the Krysni and their immense and sapient floating cities had never developed anything remotely like material technology at all.

Where in hell had they gotten electron beam weaponry? Who had taught them how to use it?

At the moment, the press of Krysni balloons around him were doing quite well without advanced technology. His crippled Starwraith was now covered by leathery blue bodies clinging tightly to his armor, their floater sacs deflated, with hundreds more Krysni clinging in layers on top of them. He could see what they were doing by picking up a visual feed from Blue Twelve—Lieutenant Namura's wraith. It looked as though some hundreds of the creatures were clinging to him, with the outer layers inflating their bodies in an attempt to lift him clear of the deck. More and more Krysni floaters were hooking on, puffing up their bodies to well over a meter in diameter, taut-skinned globes filled with biochemically heated hydrogen.

He fired his X-ray laser, the beam punching through bodies and releasing a roiling cloud of smoke. More Krysni drifted in to replace the ones incinerated by his attack. He fired again…and then a third time, each shot burning away dozens of the things, but then his power reserves plummeted and the laser cut out after the third pulse.

“Blue Flight, this is Blue Seven!” he called out. “My weapons are dead!”

“Same here!” Lieutenant Radevic shouted. “Weapon power leads are burned through!”

“Blue, Blue Two!” Amendes said. “Repulsors out! Weapons down! I've gone—”

And then static hissed through the comm feed, as Garwe's in-head display, with tiny icons for each of the Blue Flight Marines, showed twelve symbols drop to eleven…then ten.

Overwhelming numbers were beginning to tell at last. Garwe found it hard to believe, impossible to believe…but the Dac balloonists were attacking a squadron of modern Marine battle pods and
winning
. It simply wasn't possible….

Abruptly, his pod shifted to the right, then inverted…came upright, then inverted again. Slowly, clumsily, they were
moving
him. He could feel the scrape and roll of tightly packed bodies as they moved. Some hundreds, now, were
clinging to the squirming mass of creatures on the inside of the ball, inflating their bodies to levitate the entire, cumbersome mass, while others vented hydrogen like tiny jets in frantic, rapid pulses, shoving him toward the edge of the platform.

Gods! A Starwraith massed almost half a ton under Dac's gravity. How many of the creatures would it take to negate that weight and actually float him off the platform?

Or perhaps they weren't actually trying to lift him, but simply to push or drag or roll him off the side. The edge of the tree house deck that was not bordered by the massive bulk of the floatreef tentacles and the surrounding aerial flora was protected by a relatively slender guardrail, and it was less than twenty meters away. If they could get him through the railing, he and some hundreds of clinging Krysni would plummet over the edge and into the black, hot, and crushing depths of the gas giant's atmospheric deeps. His attackers seemed utterly unconcerned about their own casualties; those crushed up against his optic sensors appeared to be dead already. Evidently, they were willing to sacrifice themselves by the hundreds simply to ensure the destruction of a single Starwraith.

He tried triggering his repulsors, but nothing happened. His primary drive power feed had melted through and shorted out. If he could just take flight, drag this whole, squirming mass high enough into the thin, cold upper reaches of atmosphere, or pull them with him into the abyss until they lost their grip and fell away…but at the moment he wasn't channeling enough power to lift a single one of these wrinkled, squirming little creatures, much less all of them
and
his battle pod.

“This is Blue Seven,” Garwe reported, his mental voice calm. “My drive systems are out. I think they're trying to drag me to the edge of the platform and drop me off!”

More data flickered through his in-head display, more systems failing. There was a chemical agent in use—a concentrated fluoroantimonic acid. Apparently, the creatures crowded in against his Starwraith were injecting, not biological tox
ins, but acid. Where the acid could reach exposed fiber optic cables and electronic circuitry, it was causing massive internal damage.

He wondered how the creatures were carrying and injecting the stuff without having their own tissues begin to break down.

The Krysni continued to close in. Xander, Palin, Mortin, Wahrst, and Javlotel as well as Garwe all were enveloped, smothered in roughly spherical masses of writhing bodies. Amendes, Cocero, and Ewis all were out of action, their pods now totally inert, no longer transmitting status or comm feed signals. Bakewin, Radevic, and Namura continued to fight, burning away at the ponderous globes of creatures enveloping their fellow Marines as more and more and still more of the meter-long floaters descended from the sky or emerged from the surrounding jungle, filling the open space above the tree house platform with drifting, jostling, jetting Krysni.

Once, years before in a combat medical training feed, Garwe had seen a simulation based on an actual optic feed from a nanotech camera adrift within a human circulatory system. The sim had been about the human body's internal defenses, its immune system and the response of antibodies to foreign invaders in the system…in this case a single, rod-shaped bacterium. The bacterium, smaller than a blood cell, was still enormous compared to the antibodies flocking to the injured region, swarming in through the pale yellow haze of the surrounding interstitial fluid in clouds, enveloping the bacterium, smothering it, adhering to it, hurling themselves against it in layer upon layer in an awesome spectacle eerily like what Garwe was seeing here and now. The individual antibodies, he recalled, looked like wrinkled, spiky, pale-translucent and roughly spherical bodies, with twisted strands of long-chain molecules extending like tentacles from their bodies. Their resemblance to the drifting Krysni was unsettling.