bioconstructs, classified by type and named after poisonous Terran reptiles. Hostile colonies were still called Xenos, but with this Naga’s help, perhaps the Confederation would be able to win more of the vast, dark beings into an alliance unlike any before known to Man.
It would be a while before she could easily think of these things as anything other than “Xenophobes,” however. Mastering an unsteady queasiness at the sight, Katya leaned against the cool, nangineered slickness of the travel pod next to the opening and peered inside.
The… creature?creatures?… within moved with a liquid, slithering sound. The travel pod contained only a tiny fragment of the Eridu Naga, about one ton of the original creature’s mass, budded from the parent and brought here to New America, months ago. Because the bud contained patterns of data stored by the parent, Confederation xenobiologists had suggested that it might be possible to use this fragment to communicate with other, still-hostile Xenophobes.
It was an exciting idea, one with great promise.
Assuming “Fred,” as his human attendants called him, didn’t fall into Imperial hands in the meantime.
Despite his nickname, Katya still couldn’t look at the entity without a twinge of revulsion. Each individual unit, or cell looked like nothing so much as a lump of tar or grease adrift in a black and viscous liquid, slug-shaped, the size of a man’s head and massing perhaps a kilogram or so. Filaments twisted within the liquid, joining each cell to its neighbors in an alien analogue of human neurons and dendrites. Individually, the Xeno units were no more intelligent than the electronics in Katya’s cephlink, responding to outside stimuli with all the insight and rationality of a flatworm. Together, however, they formed a colony creature with an intelligence that was almost certainly far greater than human.
Any uncertainty in that classification was due not to doubt about the being’s intelligence, but to its sheer difference. Xenos didn’t think like humans. With group-memories spanning millennia, possessing a bewildering array of alien senses but lacking both sight and hearing, and with a worldview of the universe literally inside-out from the human perspective, Xenophobes’ awareness of their surroundings simply could not be defined in human terms.
Without even a common means of perceiving the universe around them, it was small wonder humans and Xenos had blundered into a war that had lasted some forty-four years now. They’d been found on several planets colonized by man, subterranean organisms, thermovores drinking the heat of a world’s core, dwelling in caverns and passageways eaten out of solid rock. Over the course of hundreds of centuries, they multiplied in those caverns, spreading out, seeping through the joints and crevices between strata, reproducing until each colony was a single titanic organism massing as much as a small moon, a vast network threaded through much of the planet’s crust.
If the things had just remained underground there would have been no conflict with humans, but eventually pieces of these planetary organisms had risen from their chthonic bastions, drawn by the vast concentrations of pure metals and artificial materials that made up human cities. Several colony worlds—An-Nur II, Lung Chi, Herakles—had eventually been evacuated, abandoned to the Xeno scourge.
For four decades, humans had been fighting back, with cephlink-piloted warstriders, with orbital laser banks and HEMILCOM battle stations, and eventually with nuclear depth charges sent burrowing into the Xenophobes’ sub-surface lairs along channels of magnetically deformed rock. On a few infested worlds, on Loki and on alien, far-distant Alya A-VI, the Xenophobes had been obliterated, and the cities were being rebuilt.
Only now, after contact with the alien DalRiss of Alya A and B, was it possible to communicate with the things.
A DalRiss cornel was waiting for her
It would be a while before she could easily think of these things as anything other than “Xenophobes,” however. Mastering an unsteady queasiness at the sight, Katya leaned against the cool, nangineered slickness of the travel pod next to the opening and peered inside.
The… creature?creatures?… within moved with a liquid, slithering sound. The travel pod contained only a tiny fragment of the Eridu Naga, about one ton of the original creature’s mass, budded from the parent and brought here to New America, months ago. Because the bud contained patterns of data stored by the parent, Confederation xenobiologists had suggested that it might be possible to use this fragment to communicate with other, still-hostile Xenophobes.
It was an exciting idea, one with great promise.
Assuming “Fred,” as his human attendants called him, didn’t fall into Imperial hands in the meantime.
Despite his nickname, Katya still couldn’t look at the entity without a twinge of revulsion. Each individual unit, or cell looked like nothing so much as a lump of tar or grease adrift in a black and viscous liquid, slug-shaped, the size of a man’s head and massing perhaps a kilogram or so. Filaments twisted within the liquid, joining each cell to its neighbors in an alien analogue of human neurons and dendrites. Individually, the Xeno units were no more intelligent than the electronics in Katya’s cephlink, responding to outside stimuli with all the insight and rationality of a flatworm. Together, however, they formed a colony creature with an intelligence that was almost certainly far greater than human.
Any uncertainty in that classification was due not to doubt about the being’s intelligence, but to its sheer difference. Xenos didn’t think like humans. With group-memories spanning millennia, possessing a bewildering array of alien senses but lacking both sight and hearing, and with a worldview of the universe literally inside-out from the human perspective, Xenophobes’ awareness of their surroundings simply could not be defined in human terms.
Without even a common means of perceiving the universe around them, it was small wonder humans and Xenos had blundered into a war that had lasted some forty-four years now. They’d been found on several planets colonized by man, subterranean organisms, thermovores drinking the heat of a world’s core, dwelling in caverns and passageways eaten out of solid rock. Over the course of hundreds of centuries, they multiplied in those caverns, spreading out, seeping through the joints and crevices between strata, reproducing until each colony was a single titanic organism massing as much as a small moon, a vast network threaded through much of the planet’s crust.
If the things had just remained underground there would have been no conflict with humans, but eventually pieces of these planetary organisms had risen from their chthonic bastions, drawn by the vast concentrations of pure metals and artificial materials that made up human cities. Several colony worlds—An-Nur II, Lung Chi, Herakles—had eventually been evacuated, abandoned to the Xeno scourge.
For four decades, humans had been fighting back, with cephlink-piloted warstriders, with orbital laser banks and HEMILCOM battle stations, and eventually with nuclear depth charges sent burrowing into the Xenophobes’ sub-surface lairs along channels of magnetically deformed rock. On a few infested worlds, on Loki and on alien, far-distant Alya A-VI, the Xenophobes had been obliterated, and the cities were being rebuilt.
Only now, after contact with the alien DalRiss of Alya A and B, was it possible to communicate with the things.
A DalRiss cornel was waiting for her
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