Jackers (35 page)

The warstrider hull slammed again against unyielding rock, flinging Dev against the side of his slot with brutal force. Metal screamed, then groaned and creaked with the growing urgency of a living creature at the edge of an agonizingly prolonged death. The RLN’s torso, half-submerged and stripped of legs and arms and its usual clusters of antenna and sensory pods, was
folding
under the caress of incredible pressures exerted by the black sea.

Dizzy, blind, disoriented, Dev couldn’t find the mask’s compartment. Gulping at the air now, straining to find substance there to keep him conscious, he sat upright in the slot. All he needed to do was touch one of the Naga’s interconnected supracells.…

His head banged rock half a meter above the warstrider’s hull, and Dev saw a momentary explosion of green-and-purple light. Raising his left hand, he felt the rough drag of rock past the cornel-encased tips of his fingers. The RLN’s hull was moving, and quickly, born on the Naga’s thick embrace through the tunnel.

But which way?Up the tunnel, in pursuit of Vic? Or back the other way, toward that reeking, briefly glimpsed pit? Keeping his head low this time, he struggled into a partly upright position, groping into absolute blackness with his cornel-clad hand, trying to touch some part of the unseen mass that carried the wreckage of his strider, boatlike on gelatinous waves. He could feel the hull tipping again as it rolled over, spilling him toward the surface that carried it. Dev thrust his arm out farther, seeking contact. Where was the Naga’s surface? Where?…

Pressures unbearable snapped the Scoutstrider’s hull and the sides of the slot closed around his waist like the jaws of a trap. Dev screamed, the sound shrilling and echoing through the blackness. Agony tore at his lower back and legs… then vanished as he felt his spine snap.

A jolt, and he was free of the wreckage, but his back was broken and shock had left him dazed and incoherent. Strange thoughts flooded his brain but he could not order them, could not begin to understand them as anything beyond scraps of nightmare hallucination. Then, with a sudden, light-headed sense of falling, he was hurled through the opening of the tunnel and into the black and empty space of the great cavern.
I’m going to die.
The thought, as he recognized it as coming from some part of himself, was actually welcome, a peace that stilled the terror that threatened to rob him of his last shreds of human reason.

Seconds later, he struck the surface of the Naga. That surface was yielding, almost liquid, but Dev struck it after falling nearly fifty meters, and he hit with killing, bone-splintering force.

On the surface, Katya had broken the seal on her LaG-42 Ghostrider and was sitting up in the open hatch, keeping her left hand against the slot’s palm interface so that she could stay linked with the communications net. Her full linkage had been broken, however. Impulsively, she wanted to experience her surroundings with her own senses, to
see
the mountain-high bulk of the atmosphere generator with her own eyes.

“Hey, Colonel?” The voice in her mind was that of her Number Two, Sublieutenant Tomid Lanager. “Don’t you think you oughta button up?”

Another child, like Ken Maubry, now dead, like Chet Martin, abandoned with the other Rangers still on New America. Katya felt so very old.

“Negative,” she snapped back, her mental voice harsh and biting. “Maintain your watch.”

“Uh, yessir.”

A half dozen other warstriders stood nearby, silently waiting. There were some people on foot, too, a platoon of armored infantry and a handful of senior officers, come to watch the great experiment. Among them was Travis Sinclair.

That’s the man who sent Dev down into the hole,
she thought, and she was surprised by her bitterness. She’d admired Sinclair, even loved him, in a hero-struck way. Now she saw him as another damned politician, a man so caught up in the jacker’s rush of playing god that he didn’t see the people around him as people. Perhaps he had once… but no more. This damned revolution of his seemed programmed for nothing but to devour children, and in the end no one would be better off for their sacrifice.

What had happened to her people—full humans and genies—back on New America?

A burst of static hissed against the background of her thoughts, then cleared. Vic’s voice sounded, frantic with fear and speed. “… Hagan, do you read me? This is Hagan, does anyone copy?”

“We’re here, Vic,” Katya sent back. Fear clutched at her throat. “What’s your situation?”

“I’m… I’m coming out. Katya, I’m sorry. Dev is lost. Dead. He must be dead.”

The words left her numb, though somehow, she’d known them even before Vic had spoken. “What… what happened?”

“I don’t know. We’d just reached the point where we could see the Naga—”

“You
did
see it, then?” Sinclair’s voice cut in. Katya could see him holding a palm comm link with a cord jacked into his left T-socket. “The Naga?…”

“I saw it, yeah.” Hagan’s voice was dry. “It just… attacked. No reason that I could see. It just rose up and blasted into the tunnel and smashed Dev’s Scoutstrider to bits.”

“What about the Eriduan Naga?” Sinclair asked.

“I don’t know. The thing got Fred, too. Just kind of washed over the pod and swallowed it. I didn’t see any change in the thing’s behavior. It just kept coming!”

“It’s okay, Vic.” Katya had to work hard to keep her mental voice steady. “It’s okay. Are you clear now?”

“Yeah. I think so. It chased me maybe a kilometer up the tunnel, then quit. I don’t see any sign of it now.”

“Maybe that was the change we were looking for,” Sinclair suggested. “The Eriduan fragment communicated—”

“I don’t think so, General,” Hagan interrupted. “Like I said, it just kept coming. Like it was mad, or something.” There was a long pause. “Okay, maybe it did change its mind and turn back. But there hasn’t been any attempt to communicate. And I don’t… I don’t think I can go back down there.…”

Katya heard the agony in Hagan’s voice, the unsteadiness, the indecisiveness. The man was on the raw edge of collapse, and when she closed her eyes and tried to imagine him far below the world’s surface, alone, surrounded by unyielding night, she could easily understand. “Vic, you can’t do anything else. Get the hell out of there.” The words burned in her mind.

“But if the Naga tries to communicate—” Sinclair began.

“Dammit, there’s nothing more he can do! There’s nothing more
any
of us can do!”

“Maybe one of us could go down and look for Dev,” Lee Chung volunteered. “I’ll go.”

“You’d be wasting your time, Lee,” Hagan said. “Katya. Don’t let him come. I tell you, I saw the thing tearing his warstrider to pieces! I don’t see how he could have survived. Oh, damn it, Katya. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.…”

“It wasn’t your fault, Vic.” Tears were stinging her eyes, blurring her vision. “He might… Dev might still make it.”

The thought was not wholly irrational. Katya remembered well her own contact with a Naga, far, far below the humid, poisonous surface of Eridu. Somehow, the Naga she’d contacted—she found herself thinking of it as Fred’s parent—had analyzed her body chemistry, then manipulated it to keep her alive, even when her survival mask’s oxygen had given out. She remembered little of that encounter still, save for the first terrifying moments of it, closeted away in blackness absolute, with the weight of a world pressing down unseen above her head.

It was hard to tell, sometimes, what was memory of actual events, and what was remembered nightmare. She shuddered, pushing back unwelcome images of being buried alive.

Could the Naga hidden somewhere below the atmosphere plant keep Dev alive? She didn’t have enough information to formulate an answer. The Naga was capable of it, certainly, as the Naga on Eridu had proved with her. But if Dev had already been dead when it engulfed him, even a Naga’s near-miraculous mastery of chemistry would not have saved him. Xenophobes possessed remarkable powers of mind and of manipulation almost at the atomic level, but they were not gods.

No miracle of mere chemistry or of nanotechnics would call back the dead.

And if the thing had been trying to kill the human trespassers in its tunnel, it would have no reason to preserve his life.

She wanted to believe Dev still lived, however, and she clung to that slender thread, clutching against her awareness like a talisman.

“Vic?” Sinclair said. How she hated that voice now! “Can you patch a feed to us of what you saw?”

“Y-yeah. Stand by.”

Dreading the images as she was, Katya nonetheless lay back down in her slot and jacked home her C- and T-sockets. Full linkage with Hagan’s Fastrider resumed as he sent recorded images of what he’d seen in the tunnel. Briefly, horribly, Katya relived the nightmare darkness and close-pressing walls, saw the black tide surge forward, saw Dev’s Scoutstrider hit, jarred backward, then swept under by the flood. She saw Vic’s last glimpse of the RLN-90, the severed, metal limbs swallowed by the onrushing wave.

She was trembling as she broke linkage, and again unbuttoned the Ghostrider’s hull and sat up, blinking back tears in the pale gold sunlight.

She didn’t want to accept what she’d just seen.

Hours later, Vic’s Fastrider appeared at the nearest entrance to the man-made mountain. The LaG-17 looked none the worse for its experience in the bowels of the planet, but it walked with what might be described as a beaten, even a despondent slouch of alloy legs and drooping hull. In all that time, there’d been no further word from underground, and Katya’s desperate hope that Dev might still be alive was relentlessly unraveling.

“You all head on back to base,” Katya told the others. “I’m going to stay here.”

“Katya…” Vic began.

“Damn it, Vic! Get out of here!”

“Let’s go, people,” Sinclair said. “Katya and Lanager will keep watch here, just… just in case Dev makes it out.”

He didn’t sound as though he believed it.

Katya knew she didn’t. Somehow, though, she still couldn’t make herself believe that he was really gone.

The other warstriders filed away, leaving the Ghostrider in motionless, silent mourning outside the man-made mountain.

Chapter 24

If humans are master technicians, the beings known as Xenophobes are master chemists, possessing, apparently, a number of inward-turned senses that can analyze individual molecules in great detail. It is quite likely that they grow and program their own nano, and that much of their consciousness centers around, not their surroundings, but their own, inner workings.

It has been suggested that this peculiar evolution arose to keep creatures sane that, though possessing super-genius minds, remain locked away for eons in the black bowels of their unchanging caverns.

—Reflections on Intelligence

Jame Carlyle

C.E.
2543

Three days later, the Imperial squadron dropped out of K-T space on the fringes of the Mu Herculis system.

Two Kako-class cruisers,
Haguro
and
Kinugasa.
Four light cruisers,
Nagara, Mogami, Suzuya,
and the newly grown and assembled
Zintu.
Four destroyers, including the Amatukaze-class
Urakaze,
“the Wind in the Bay.” A dozen lesser craft, corvettes and light-hulled frigates.

And leading them all was Kawashima’s flagship, the massive, kilometer-long dragonship
Donryu.

Kawashima was linked into
Donryu’s
AI network, with schematics of the system unfolding with a computer’s speed and crisp precision before his inner eye. Green diamonds glowed against the backdrop of stars, one embracing the golden glare of Mu Herculis A and almost lost in its light, a second surrounding the dim, red speck that was the system’s red dwarf pair, and a third tagging a single, brilliant white star shining just to one side of the primary. The graphic diamonds marked nearby sources of neutrinos; the stars produced neutrinos naturally, as part of the nuclear processes burning in their cores; the white “star,” however, was not a star, but a planet. A quick check of
Donryu’s
data base called up long scrolls of data on the Mu Herculis system. The world was Mu Herculis A III, and both the planet’s surface and nearby space should be dead, with all fusion plants shut down years ago. The neutrinos marking the planet indicated that someone was using fusion plants there, that they’d either fired up the big power system aboard the orbiting fragment of the sky-el, or they were generating power aboard orbiting spacecraft and with smaller plants on the ground.

Kawashima had guessed right.

Certain at first that Cameron must have gone to Lung Chi, he’d changed his mind after reflecting further. The young rebel Cameron, after all, knew as well as did Kawashima that the Imperium had full access to the histories of both him and his father. Cameron would guess, surely, that any deliberate search for him must include the Lung Chi system, even if the searchers were unaware that he had with him a fragment of tame Xenophobe and hoped to use it to make contact with the strange beings.

Dev Cameron’s record, or such of it as he had access to through
Donryu’s
data base, indicated that he had a talent for doing the unexpected. If he thought the Empire might search for him at Lung Chi, he would go to Mu Herculis instead.

Or not. The damned
gaijin
rebel was capable of carrying the they-know-that-I-know game back through any number of regressions. But Kawashima’s gut instinct insisted that Cameron had brought the refugees from New America
here,
to a Xeno-dead system that no one had even thought about for twenty years. Just in case he’d guessed wrong, Kawashima had sent the remainder of Ohka Squadron—minus the destroyers he’d left at New America and the smaller craft sent to check Loki, An-Nur II, and Sandoval—to Lung Chi.

But the rebels, Kawashima had been certain throughout the month-long voyage from 26 Draconis, would be
here.