Читать книгу Semper Human - Ian Douglas, Matthew Taylor - Страница 10

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 inability 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.”

“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 unscrolling 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 toxins, 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.

Antibodies, defending their host.

Then his optical feed cut out, suddenly, as Namura’s pod came under savage attack from four separate electron beam sources. All he could see now were the bodies of Krysni pressed in against his external pick-ups, glowing slightly at infrared wavelengths.

How long, he wondered, could the tough inner shell of his pod last against this concerted assault? His Starwraith’s on-board AI continued to report on the steadily deteriorating situation as circuit after circuit foamed into inert uselessness at the touch of that concentrated acid, as power reserves drained away, as the last of the active nano coating the machine lost power or programming or coherence and flaked away, dead. His pod was all but inert, now, though the sensors continued to feed him a trickle of optical and kinesthetic data.

He was falling. His battle pod’s kinesthetic feeds fed sensations directly to his inner ear, and he could feel himself dropping within the savage grasp of Dac’s gravitational field, better than two and a half times a standard Earth gravity. After the first few seconds, he wasn’t quite in free fall, he noted. The external atmospheric pressure and temperature were rising swiftly as he fell, and the battle pod and its ungainly cocoon of Krysni defenders rapidly hit a terminal velocity of perhaps twelve hundred kilometers per hour.

He could feel the shudders and jolts as the enveloping shell of dead and dying Krasni ripped away a few at a time.

Swathed in darkness, he plummeted into the abyss. …