WARSTRIDER
REBELLION — 02
WILLIAM H. KEITH, JR.
AVON BOOKS • NEW YORK
If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”
“Hope Eyrie” © Leslie Fish. 1975: recorded by Firebird Arts & Music of Oregon, P.O. Box 14785, Portland, Oregon 97214-9998.
WARSTRIDER: REBELLION is an original publication of Avon Books. This work has never before appeared in book form. This work is a novel. Any similarity to actual persons or events is purely coincidental.
AVON BOOKS
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New York, New York 10019
Copyright © 1993 by William H. Keith Jr.
Published by arrangement with the author
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 92-97435
ISBN: 0-380-76880-1
All rights reserved, which includes the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever except as provided by the U.S. Copyright Law. For information address The Ethan Ellenberg Literary Agency. 548 Broadway. #5-E, New York. New York 10012.
First AvoNova Printing: June 1993
AVON TRADEMARK REG. U.S. PAT. OFF. AND IN OTHER COUNTRIES, MARCA REGISTRADA, HECHO EN CANADA
Printed in Canada
UNV 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2
Prologue
There was Rock… and there was »self«, the former parting for the latter in the flux of powerful magnetic fields. A universe of rock subtly textured and diverse surrounded »self« in a warm and comforting embrace that flowed around »self’s« shell with semimolten plasticity as it burrowed upward through the yielding strata. Behind lay the depths of Mother Rock; ahead, closer now, was the goal, a concentration of riches undreamed of, a magnetic anomaly tasting of deliciously, dizzyingly pure metals, ceramics, and hydrocarbon compounds.
»Self« could sense its universe in myriad ways: through density and water content and something that might be called the taste of silica, quartz, limestone, metal-sharp ores, and hydrocarbons; through the tug of gravity; through magnetic fields and the far weaker trickle of electrons within the Rock; through the life-giving heat of encompassing Rock and the dimly sensed “flavor” of remarkably concentrated metals now so close ahead.
Though »self’s« concept of time was not, strictly speaking, linear, it knew that it wouldn’t be much longer now.
Dimly, »self« remembered Self, a far vaster progenitor of »self« now far below and behind the upward threading fragment. It shared Self’s perception of the universe, of course, though it remembered only dream-vague slivers of its past life. Self’s view of the universe was shaped by its evolutionary genesis eons past in the bowels of another world light-millennia distant, and by a harshly Boolean logic that perceived its surroundings in terms of yes and no, of Self and not-Self of Rock and not-Rock. It did not, could not, recognize the concept of other worlds. In Self’s curiously inverted reality, Universe was an infinite sea of Rock, growing ever denser and ever hotter in all directions out from the Center, while at the Center itself lay a vast emptiness, the Chasm at the Heart of Creation. Self’s former Selves, its predecessors that had vaulted the gulf from another world to this, had passed down memories of the crossing as frozen lattices of magnetic bonds between Self’s subcellular, nanotechnic components, but those memories held images only of black emptiness and slow-dragging eons of time, and not of separate worlds or stars or the basis of astronomical theory.
Tunneling through rock turned plastic, »self« was suddenly aware of near-vacuum, of a flood of radiation, of alien sensations that recalled the memories of the central Chasm. Breakthrough! Self had emerged in the emptiness at the universe’s heart!
Disorientation swirled within the several parts of »self«, dizzying, mind-wrenching. This particular local expression of Self had never pierced the walls of the Great Cavern, and inherited memories were weak and fragile things compared to this new perspective on the world.
Analysis…
The vacuum was not absolute. There was matter beyond the cavern wall, a thin gas of recognizable elements combined in unfamiliar molecules. Oxygen was present, for instance, but as free 02 instead of the Usual SiO2 or Fe2O3 of Rock. Self’s knowledge of astronomy was nonexistent, but its understanding of physical chemistry was superb, its analysis of its surroundings flawlessly precise. »Self« was bathed in electromagnetic radiation as well, energy in two separate frequency bands, one between 107 and 1010 hertz, and another between 1014 and 1015 hertz. It suspected that the gap between the two sets of frequencies was the result of absorption by the tenuous gas that blanketed this place.
Self/»self« lived by absorbing energy directly through shifting, nanotechnic surfaces, but the high-energy end of the spectrum was more than it was used to, or needed. Adjusting its surface to a dazzling, reflective silver, »self« began to morph from the slender, streamlined shape used in through-rock travel to the more utilitarian, globular shape of an explorer. Tentacles flicked out, questing. Weapons formed, a precaution in case of attack.
But »self’s« movements were painfully sluggish, slowed by the bombardment of raw data from eighteen separate senses. Reality was far stranger than second- and third-linked images of transmitted memory, imperfectly perceived, imperfectly understood. Emptiness clawed at »self«, the raw wonder and terror of the not-Rock Void at the Heart of Creation. And… and there were things here, things at once not-Self, yet, impossibly, they moved, reacted, acted in all ways alive… like Self, yet not.…
And they were attacking.
Through fragmentary recollections of past encounters, transmitted to its progeny by Self, »self« knew of the not-Self things that could not be alive because they were not-Self, yet nevertheless seemed to have some alien, unreachable life of their own. Something perhaps twice »self’s« mass, something of intricate and literally incomprehensible form, was already probing the outer shell that protected »self« with a barrage of various radiations. Something like a smooth-shaped rock penetrated »self’s« shell, then detonated.
Hurt! Dysfunction! Appendages lay on the ground, uselessly writhing, now little »selves« of their own and independent of »self’s« control. Pivoting, »self« brought weapons of its own to bear.…
Too late! »Self« could feel its consciousness dwindling, lessening with each new, explosive impact. »Self« was, in fact, a cascade of separate consciousness, of many »selves« nested within one another. Dominant was »self«, but »self« was the sum total of hundreds of separate Nodes, and each Node was composed of trillions of cells, some biological, some technological, and each capable of an independent, if limited, existence. Many Nodes working together made »self«, just as many trillions of »selves« together composed the far vaster Unity of Self.
Flame, a white-hot plasma, scorched the writhing tendrils and seared away »self’s« outer layers. Worse, the Adversary’s own nanotech weapons had been loosed and were disassembling »self’s« molecular structure almost atom by atom.
Then »self« was gone, replaced by the random gropings of the Nodes, those that had survived the explosion, at least. And under the deadly assault by radiation and flame and nanotechnic disassemblers, even the Nodes were beginning to dissolve. The memories of other places were gone now, as was any memory of »self’s« personal past or of the glory of lost Self.
And then, even awareness itself was gone.
The LaG-42 Ghostrider stood at the crater’s edge. Within the Ghostrider’s protective armor, Lieutenant Vincent Creighton, 3rd New American Mechanized Cavalry, surveyed the scene through the warstrider’s senses, probing the milk-white haze above the disintegrating Xeno.
The Xeno was dead… and it was damned lucky Creighton had seen the thing when it first nosed clear of the ground. Xeno snakes were always a bit slow shapeshifting to combat mode, and that was definitely the best time to hit them. This one had been a Mamba, a big son of a bitch, and more than a match for a LaG-42 when it was fully morphed and ready for a fight.
Grimly, Creighton turned his attention from the crater to his surroundings, a densely forested hillside beneath an azure-green sky. The domes of Winchester, the planet’s capital, glittered in the distance. Closer at hand, scattered pastiches of red and gold forest reminded him of New America… though the gauzy, mushroom-shaped trees of the Wilderland only remotely resembled the arboreal forms of either 26 Draconis IV or Earth itself. Eridu was a lovely world, one of the Hegemony’s richest and most promising extrasolar colonies.
Or it had been.
Now that the Xenos were here, Creighton knew better than most that the world’s eerie loveliness was doomed. More of the subterranean monsters would appear… then more. Nuclear weapons would be used. Eridu would become a wasteland, her native ecology ravaged, her population herded into camps. The terraformers would have their way at last.
The thought filled Vince Creighton with a bitterness that left him, momentarily at least, unable to link fully with his warstrider. For several seconds, he stood motionless on the crater rim, concentrating on the largely automatic process of safing his weapons and reporting the Xeno kill over his tactical net. Then, finally, he was able to swing the big machine about and start it stalking back toward his base.
A gentle rain began falling an hour later, washing the milk-thick mist back into the ground, until little remained of the Xenophobe machine save blackened lumps of twisted metal.
Chapter 1
Nippon’s ascendance to world domination during the twenty-first century was scarcely surprising. By stepping into the high-tech void left by the former superpowers when they abandoned space research in the late 1900s and early 2000s, Japan assured its preeminence in space manufacturing and materials sciences. These advances led directly to even greater revolutions: nanotechnic engineering, biocomputer implants, and ultimately, of course, to the K-T drive that gave Man the stars.
—Man and His Works
Karl Gunther Fielding
C.E. 2448
North, the glowing white thread of the Singapore Sky-el slashed vertically out of the sky, ruler-straight against the night. East, the full moon rose silver above the glittering pillar of its own reflection.
With a dwindling hum, the magflitter settled gently onto the teak landing platform beneath hovering glowglobes. A scarlet-clad attendant was at its side at once, sliding the canopy aside and assisting the slender young man from the vehicle.
“Konichiwa” the attendant greeted him with a crisp bow, his Nihongo perfect though his features looked Malaysian or Indonesian rather than Japanese. He held out a book-sized facereader, its slick black surface drinking the glowglobes’ light. “Identity, please?”
Dev Cameron extended his left hand, bringing the intricate pattern of golden wires and circuits embedded at the base of his thumb into contact with the reader. Somewhere beneath this mountaintop, the estate’s computer would be scanning his interface and, through it, the cephlink plexus embedded between the hemispheres of Dev’s brain, reading his service record and ID data.
The black surface of the reader flashed green. “Domo arigato gozaimashte,” the attendant said, bowing again, and Dev sensed, rather than heard, the marginal relaxation of unseen figures in the darkness outside the circle of light on the landing deck. Kodama’s personal guard, no doubt, watching for uninvited guests. “Welcome to Lord Kodama’s estate, Chuisan. A servot will store your vehicle. Please, this way.”
He led Dev onto a curving, stone-walled path, around a garden of exotic night-blooming plants and up toward the estate proper. Taisho Yasunari Kodama’s party had already been in full swing for hours, though guests continued to arrive as the night sky darkened overhead. The Admiral, a member of the Emperor’s personal staff, was well-known for these affairs, and to be invited to one was not only an honor, it was considered a mark of special favor. For military personnel, at least, an invitation to Pulau Kodama indicated a rising career, even official Imperial notice.
Dev, tall, pale-complexioned, and unaccustomedly resplendent in the immaculate dress blacks of an Imperial army officer, stepped into the throng gathered on the veranda outside Kodama’s imposing, sleekly modern hab. It was difficult to tell at a glance where outside ended and the building began, for walls and skylights were open to the night air, and dancing holographic sculptures shifted and interpenetrated in soft-glowing abstracts and geometrical patterns.
Hundreds of guests were already present, gathered in small groups for conversation and drinking, or swaying rhythmically in larger circles to the liquid ripplings and tone-shifting drips and plops of Hagiwara’s water music. Attire, Dev noted, ran the gamut from full military dress with sword and honors to formal jackets or gowns to masquerade costumes to complete undress. Many of Kodama’s guests, men and women both, were nude save for jewelry, richly ornate skin implants, elaborate masks, or headpieces. The military officers present were all Imperials, in army black or navy white, and all were high-ranking, taisa or above.
Which left Dev feeling unpleasantly out of place. He couldn’t attend a function like this without surreptitiously checking from time to time to make certain that his tunic was clean, the folds of his arm cloak were hanging straight, and his gold braid aiguillettes were still secure on his shoulder. His rank of chu-i, equivalent to that of a Hegemony army lieutenant or a naval j.g., was startlingly junior in this gathering of shoshos and chujos, while the glittering civilians present included senior Imperial administrators, diplomats, well-known ViRdrama personalities, and even a few Hegemony governors returned to Earth from the frontier.
Still, the starburst medal at the throat of his blacks, the Teikokuno Hoshi, commanded a respect beyond that usually accorded the two cherry blossom pips of a chu-i on his collar tabs and shoulder boards. The Imperial Star had opened doors undreamed of just a year or two earlier. All things considered, Dev had done quite well for a gaijin—a non-Japanese—from the free housing warrens of BosWash.
A servant in a traditional kimono approached, bowed low, and offered him a sensphere.
“Arigato,” Dev said, accepting the crystal sphere. It warmed pleasantly against his interface, inducing an erotic tingle and a mild euphoria as he walked deeper into the crowd. An Imperial Navy shosho, a rear admiral, smiled and nodded back as Dev inclined his head in a polite bow. Yes, he’d come far indeed for a gaijin. Pride and the stimulation of the sensphere mingled, countering self-doubt.
Scanning the throng for a familiar face, he saw only strangers and had to suppress an irrational disappointment. Kodama’s hab, after all, was huge, and he’d seen only a tiny piece of it so far. But he still wanted to know: had she come? The black pillar of an information kiosk caught his eye, and he pressed his way toward it through the crowd. Shifting the sensphere to his right hand to free his interface, Dev placed his palm against the cool slickness of the pillar, framing his questions: Is Katya Alessandro here yet? If she is, where is she?
Answers formed in his mind as the hab’s AI consulted its memory, then scanned through the hab’s many rooms, levels, and balconies. A map drew itself in Dev’s mind. He was here, near the main entrance. She was there… through the main foyer and out on the north veranda.
So she had come after all. Maybe she’d changed her mind, then, about leaving Earth. He hurried on into the central core of Kodama’s hab.
The entire island belonged to Kodama. Once, it had been given over to a sprawling warehouse facility, part of the far-flung Towerdown complex encircling the base of Earth’s oldest sky-el space tower some one hundred fifty kilometers south of Singapore. Fifty years earlier, however, Kodama’s father, himself a member of the Imperial Court, had purchased the island, then loosed a cloud of nanotechnic converters on the place, stripping it to bedrock and transforming the sterile ranks of storage towers into this palatial estate—a small city in one building, actually—clinging to a mountaintop above impenetrable, genetically nangineered jungle.
Though the Inglic word hab suggested a permanent habitation, Kodama rarely lived here, but it was a spectacular place for a party. The main foyer was like a cathedral’s interior, the vaulted ceiling three stories overhead. Gene-tailored koi of fantastic shapes, miniature dragons and whales and indescribable monstrosities, swam in the stone pool beneath shifting patterns of holographic geometry. The walls were lost in stars, and the thronging thousand or so people in the room seemed to stand on empty space, with the vast, crimson-cored pinwheel of the galaxy turning slowly beneath their feet.
Following the map still outlined in his cephlink RAM, Dev made his way to the north veranda. Through a shimmering veil of liquid light, more dozens of people were gathered outside on a railed balcony overlooking jungle, silver beaches, and island-dotted sea.
“Excuse me,” a woman’s sultry voice said at his back. Her Nihongo had the crisp precision of someone using a downloaded RAM language implant. “Are you Devis Cameron? The one who destroyed the Xenos?”
He turned at the voice and found himself facing a cute Eurasian woman wearing sandals, a startling spray of peacock tail feathers as a halo about her lavender hair, and little else. An intricate pattern of loops and whorls etched in glowing gold descended from her right shoulder to her wrist, bright enough to cast shadows that shifted across her skin in interesting patterns as she moved.
“Destroyed them? No. I was with the team that first managed to talk with them, though, out at GhegnuRish.”
The woman rubbed her sensphere against her cheek with slow, sensuous movements as she listened to him, but her violet eyes lacked any trace of comprehension. “I ViRed what you did out there,” she said, her voice dropping to an intimate huskiness as she shifted to deliciously accented Inglic. “It was wonderful!”
The way she said the words triggered memory. Dev thought he recognized her now… a well-known erotic ViRdrama actress. He was a little taken aback. He was certain he’d enjoyed simming as her lover more than once—through a recjack linkage, of course—but he could remember neither her name nor the scenarios she’d played in.
“Just—ah—lucky. I was in the right place at the right time.”
He didn’t add that he’d stumbled into a hole in the ruins of a long-dead city on the DalRiss homeworld, fallen into a cavern deep underground, and there confronted the alien horror known to Man as the Xenophobes only because he’d had little choice. A DalRiss biological construct, a sheath of living tissue on his arm called a comel, had enabled him to touch some part of the Xenophobe’s mind, enough to learn a little about what it was and how it viewed the universe.
“Oh, no,” the woman breathed, her peacock feathers rustling, their eyespot patterns faintly luminous in the dim light. “You’re far too modest. I understand that, because of what you did down in that awful cave, the Empire’s won the Xeno war!”
“Well, let’s hope so.” Dev decided that it wouldn’t do any good to explain reality to her. His brief contact with a Xeno world mind had taught him something about that enigmatic blend of biological organism and submicroscopic nanomachine. The war would be continuing for a long time to come, but he very much doubted that the girl was interested in Xeno life cycles or worldviews or that she’d believe him if he told her the truth. Looking past her, he thought he saw a familiar silhouette against the moonlight on the veranda.
“Uh, excuse me,” he said, breaking away just as she took a step closer. “Shitsurei shimasu. There’s someone over there I have to see.”
“Hurry back, Devis. I’m looking forward to finding out all ...
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