within the forest, their float bags flaccid as they used their tentacles to move through the tangle of vegetation and living branches of the undereef.
“This is Captain Xander, Associative Marine Force,” the squadron CO said over the local Net frequency for the compound. “Who’s in charge here?”
“I don’t think any of us is in charge, exactly …” a voice replied.
“Then you are, now,” Xander replied. “Who are you?”
“Vasek Trolischet,” the voice said. “I’m the senior xenosoph here.”
Blocks of data came up in a window within Garwe’s mind, streaming through from the compound’s data base. There was a vid, too, of a bald, dark-skinned human male with dazzling golden eyes. No, Garwe corrected himself. Not completely human, but a genegineered subspecies, an s-Human, Homo sapiens superioris. And apparently she was female.
Shit, a supie, one of the Marines broadcast on the squadron backchannel. Just fucking great.
“What happened here?” Xander asked the compound spokesperson.
“I don’t know.” The supie’s words were clipped, tight, and rapid-fire, as though her time sense had been jacked into overdrive. “The baggies just went crazy! Attacked our research team while they were trying to get language samples, and tossed two of them over the edge! Then a whole mob swarmed in and got two more of our security team before anyone knew what was going on!”
“There had to be a reason,” Xander said, deliberately transmitting at a slower pace. “Do you have a translation frequency?”
“Yes, but their attempts at communication are still quite scrambled. Our heuristic algorithms are necessarily incomplete.”
Garwe had to pull a definition for “heuristic” from his implant AI, and even then wasn’t sure he understood how the person was using the word. The damned supies enjoyed talking above the heads of others, especially norms, and scuttlebutt around the barracks had it that they liked flaunting their so-called superiority.
An astronomical IQ hadn’t stopped this one from getting into bad trouble, though. The Krysnis were beginning to advance over the tree house deck, inflating their bodies to taut, pale-blue bubbles over a meter across and drifting slowly toward the Marine line.
“Hold your fire,” Xander repeated. “I don’t think they’re armed.”
“They have lots of arms, Skipper,” Lieutenant Malleta said, the nervousness in his voice at odds with the attempt at a joke. There were hundreds of the creatures in a mass in front of the Marines, now, their inflated bodies bumping and jostling with one another as they drifted forward.
“Halt!” Xander barked, speaking Standard, but the transmission translated to a sharp chirp by the translation algorithm from the compound. It sounded, Garwe thought, like the unpleasant squeak of a couple of rubber balloons rubbed together.
“Hey, Captain?” Lieutenant Bollan asked. “Those things are full of hydrogen, right? If we shoot ’em—”
“Use your head, Bollan,” Xander replied. “There’s no oxygen in the air to burn. No fire. No hydrogen explosion, okay?”
“Oh, yeah. Right.”
Garwe had been thinking about that unpleasant possibility as well, and was able to relax a bit. The captain was right. Shoot one of those gas bags with an electron arc and the thing might pop, but it wouldn’t go up in flames. The entire ecosystem within this world’s atmosphere relied on metabolic processes that took in methane and ammonia, metabolized them for carbon and the nitrogen, and gave off hydrogen. Oxygen was present, but only as a part of trace chemical compounds like water vapor, carbon dioxide, or sulfuric or nitric acids. Fires needed free oxygen to burn, and that just wasn’t going to happen in the reducing atmosphere of a gas giant.
The mass of Krysni continued to drift forward. “Shoot them, Xander!” the s-Human was shouting over the link. “Shoot the little gasbag smuggers!”
An indicator light went on in Garwe’s in-head display, indicating that Lieutenant Sanders was charging his primary weapon; a thought would trigger it. “Belay that, Sanders!” Xander snapped. “All of you! Primaries on safe!”
Reluctantly, Garwe safed his weapons. Marine battlepods should be strong enough to protect them from anything this crowd could throw at them.
Starwraith design, actually, was based on the robotic combat machines developed by the Xul. Normally the outer surface was smooth and unadorned, marked only by a dozen or so randomly placed lenses of various optical and electronic scanners. At need, Garwe could extrude a number of manipulative tentacles, heavier graspers, or weapons, the members growing out of the pod’s surface through nanotechnic hull flow and controlled directly by his thoughts. The pod was actually extraordinarily plastic, capable of assuming a wide range of shapes limited only by its total mass of about two hundred kilos, and the need to maintain a roughly human-sized and -shaped inner capsule to protect the wearer/pilot.
Each pod also possessed a number of high-tech defense systems, and Marine training included long hours of practice in the pod-encased equivalent of hand-to-hand combat.
Again, Xander addressed the crowd. “You are trespassing on diplomatic territory!” she called, the translation going out as shrill chirps and whistles. “Leave this area at once! Return to your reef—”
And then the jostling, bumping mob surged forward, each Krysni launching itself on a jet of hot hydrogen.
And the Battle of Hassetas had begun.
3
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,
