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  WARSTRIDER

  BATTLEMIND — 06

  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."

  WARSTRIDER: BATTLEMIND is an original publication of Avon Books. This work has never before appeared in hook form. This work is a novel. Any similarity to actual persons or events is purely coincidental.

  AVON BOOKS

  A division of

  The Hearst Corporation

  1350 Avenue of the Americas

  New York. New York 10019

  Copyright © 1996 by William H. Keith.Jr.

  Cover art by Dorian Vallejo

  Published by arrangement with the author

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 96-96031

  ISBN: 0-380-77969-2

  All rights reserved, which includes the right to reproduce this hook 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. #5H. New York. New York 10012

  First AvoNova Printing: August 1996

  AVONOVA TRADEMARK REG. U.S. PAT. OFF. AND IN OTHER COUNTRIES, MARC A REGISTRADA, HECHO EN U.S.A.

  Printed in the U.S.A.

  RA 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Epilogue

  TERMINOLOGY AND GLOSSARY

  Japanese Words and Phrases

  Prologue

  The associative known as Sholai was the first to notice the Mailing Web.

  One moment, there was only empty space, ablaze with thick-scattered stars and the hazy light-river of the Great Circle, with Tovan and Doval agleam like bright, close-set eyes, with Lakah’vnyu showing a slender crescent embracing the night glow of the vast Gr’tak cities. The next moment it was there, dropping out of nothingness, a slim, egg-smooth complexity of organic forms, colored an impenetrable and light-drinking black.

  Sholai, for this cycle at least, was nine-in-one, two greaters, three lessers, two receivers, one deeper, and an artificial, the union of nine giving its associative a shared intelligence level of well over two thousand. It was currently patrolling a sector of space along the outskirts of the Doval-Tovan system’s primary ice belt, maintaining the old watch for comets or asteroids perturbed by the system’s dim, distant third member, bodies of a type that more than once in the Associative’s long, difficult history had bombarded the homeworld of Lakah’vnyu, in many cases wiping it nearly clean of life, in other, more recent catastrophes causing damage enough to blast newly risen civilizations back into unjoined barbarism. This was why Sholai’s motion detectors were set at full spread and receptivity, watching, waiting for anything on an orbital path that might eventually pose a threat to the Family.

  Indeed, the ancient threat posed by the system’s numerous cometfalls was the primary driving force that had taken the Family into space in the first place, a step that had led, after another thousand circuits of Lakah’vnyu about Doval-Tovan, to the stars. Since the Gr’tak had finally achieved the age-old dream of spaceflight three hundred generations before, civilization had not fallen once, and all within the multiple collectives felt more secure knowing that even if a ten-kilometer chunk of ice did make it past Sholai and its share-companions, the Family was now firmly grounded not in one coastal swamp, but in a thousand.

  The Family would survive.…

  The target Sholai was tracking now was disturbing, however. It was certain that the object had not been there a moment before… and its surface was reflecting radar and laser energies in such a way as to suggest a smooth and sculpted outer surface, like polished ice, rather than the broken and rubble-strewn surface of a typical comet. The target was almost certainly artificial.

  In size, the thing rivaled the largest of the Gr’tak space colonies, nearly eight eli long and massing well over three million g’shah. Something that large should have registered on Sholai’s instrumentation long before it had actually noted the thing’s presence, no matter how black it was. As Sholai considered this paradox, it arrived at the only conclusion possible, that the thing really had appeared out of nowhere… or, rather, that it had appeared out of someplace other than the normal continuum of time and three-dimensional space.

  Sholai’s people had never developed a means of traveling faster than the speed of light—a velocity that appeared to be an absolute limiting factor in space travel. The fact that voyages to the stars required centuries at half of that speed, however, meant little to a species possessing immortality.

  The Lakah’vnyud Cooperative of Sciences had long speculated about the possibility of circumventing the speed of light. Neither Sholai nor any of the associatives its individuals maintained membership in had ever explored the Science Cooperative’s discussions, but it was aware that the concept was at least theoretically possible… as it was aware of the theoretical possibility that there were other intelligences elsewhere in the universe. Sholai’s artificial engaged the library memory. Columns of text scrolled down the display screen in the pitch-verbalization script of the Family’s principal scientific language.

  No… this object, whatever it was, was like nothing ever encountered or manufactured by the Family. Sholai had its artificial transmit a full report on everything noted so far. At this distance from Lakah’vnyu, the signal would take two hours to get there.

  The object, meanwhile, was doing a most uncometlike thing. It was accelerating, hard, boosting at an incredible three hundred gravities toward the inner system. Sholai fired its thrusters, seeking to bring its ship into an intercept orbit, but in seconds the stranger had passed sunsward of it, still accelerating, moving too fast now to catch.

  Still transmitting, Sholai turned its ship and decelerated to kill its momentum and drop it into a sunsward vector, trying to follow the stranger anyway. The alien spacecraft—that had to be what it was—had passed twelve thousand eli distant, yet the magnetic fields that seemed to be a byproduct of its propulsion system had registered hundreds of gan. And now, something strange was happening to the alien ship.…

  Chapter 1

  Humankind has suffered a long and sometimes humiliating chain of displacements throughout the course of history. It is, perhaps, to his credit that he has continued pressing out, seeking to explore the universe about him, despite these repeated blows to his pride. In the sixteenth century, the Copernican Revolution started things rolling with the demonstration that Earth was not the center of the universe. In the early twentieth century, Shapley showed that Earth’s solar system was not even located—as had been assumed from the more or less even distribution of the Milky Way across the sky—at the center of the Galaxy, but was instead positioned off in the suburbs, some 25,000 light years from the core.

  Contact with non-human intelligences—the Naga, in particular, in their original, if mistakenly presumed, guise as “xenophobes” bent on destroying Man—completed the toppling of humanity from its pedestal of arrogance. There were creatures—th
ings—abroad in this our Galaxy capable of eradicating Mankind completely… and of not even being aware that they had done so.

  —The Human Perspective

  PROFESSOR DWIGHT EVERETT MARTIN

  C.E. 2566

  The Great Annihilator dominated a sky crowded with suns and light. It hung suspended within the cavern of stars and thronging nebulae, an immense, ragged-rimmed pancake of incandescent gas, a tight-packed spiral of star stuff grinding into ultimate and utter destruction as it whirled in toward the intensely hot, dazzling core of light at the center.

  It doesn’t look black, Captain Kara Hagan thought with a wry flash of irreverence. But, of course, the black hole itself, squirreled away at the center of that sweeping, in-spiraling accretion disk, was invisible at this distance of some hundreds of light years, lost in the glare spilling from the annihilation of suns. So vast was the scale of that accretion disk that its outer arms appeared motionless; and even toward the center, where friction and radiation drove the temperature of the in-falling mass into blue-white fury more dazzling than a lightning stroke, Kara could only just make out the lazy drift of vast clots of gas and dust and starcore debris. Like searchlights, actinic, blue-white beams cast ghostly pillars of hazy radiance light years out from the black hole’s poles. The energies represented by those ghostly beams, Kara knew, were awesome. An analysis of their light would indicate the unmistakable 511-keV signature of positronic annihilation, the telltale gamma-ray deathscream of anti-electrons shrieking into oblivion as they plowed through an electron sea.

  Elsewhere, Heaven was Cold, unwinking flame. Stars thronged in unnumbered hosts across a vast and gently curving wall shot through with twisted filaments of gas and knotted, tangled nebulae—a vast cavern walled with stars and ringed by multihued clouds of molecular gas. Within, space itself seemed to glow with the harsh illumination of ionizing radiations that would have reduced any unprotected and merely human body to a charred cinder in the blink of an eye. Kara, however, was well protected at the moment, her body the egg-smooth, night-black ovoid of one of the new Naga-grown warstriders in its space-traversing mode, hurtling through the void at the Galactic center.

  It would be so easy to lose all sense of scale here, she thought. Galactic surveys made from afar indicated that this cavern at the Galaxy’s heart measured a thousand light years across… but there was no way the human eye or mind could comprehend such distances. That wall of glowing suns, that band of red and blue and silver-tinged nebulae could be a few kilometers distant, so far as her senses were concerned.

  There were times when human senses, even augmented by sophisticated electronics and bioprostheses, were laughably inadequate.

  She couldn’t see them, but scattered out to either side across a crescent five hundred kilometers across, forty-seven other Mark XC Black Falcon warstriders were pacing her, matched perfectly to her course and speed. Designated as First Company, the Black Phantoms, of the First Battalion, First Confederation Rangers, they were organized into four squadrons of twelve, the first under Kara’s direct command, the other three commanded by lieutenants. Deployed as a reconnaissance patrol, they were moving swiftly and in near-invisible stealth, the nanotechnic outer layers of their hulls set to absorb every photon of radiation, whether at radio, radar, visible light, or gamma-ray wavelengths, rather than allowing even a flicker of reflection to give them away. Commo chatter had been subdued since they’d entered this region, not so much from fear of the enemy overhearing—the new commo modes made eavesdropping impossible—as because of the oppressive scale of the space they were traversing.

  “My God in heaven,” she heard someone say over the tactical link. Her comm control program identified the speaker as Sergeant Deke Kemperer, in Second Squadron.

  “I’m registering enough rads out there to fry us all in a microsec or two,” Warstrider Valda Harrison added. “I hope to hell these magshields hold.…”

  “Zero out that talk,” Kara said, a little more harshly than she intended. In the midst of such splendor, such immensity, it would be easy to become overawed and lose any sense of purpose or focus. “Let’s keep our minds on the job.”

  “It’s not like the machine bastards can hear us,” Lieutenant Pellam Hochstader said. The tall, bearded lieutenant was Second Squadron’s commander. “We do have secure commo freaks here.”

  “I wonder what this empty part was like,” Third Squadron’s Lieutenant Ran Ferris added thoughtfully, “when it was all full of stars?”

  “Poetry later, Ran,” she said, but she knew he’d caught the warmth in her mental voice. “Right now, we’re here to kill things.”

  “If we can find the gokkers,” Kemperer added.

  The immediate absence of any opposition added to the void’s oppressiveness… and the haunting mystery that permeated it. The emptiness was explained easily enough, of course. There were multiple black holes here at the Galaxy’s center, burrowed away at the very center of the thronging beeswarm of stars that formed the core of the Milky Way. Hanging in the far distance, some three hundred light years away, was the object long known to Earth-based astronomers as Sagittarius West, centered on the fierce and tiny pinprick of Sagittarius West*, the precise gravitational center of the Galaxy’s great spiral, a compact accumulation of some millions of solar masses at the heart of a sweeping spiral of violently heated gas. Much closer at hand, a few light days away at most, was a smaller but stranger denizen of the zoo of strange objects at the Galactic Core, the fifteen-solar-mass black hole known since the late twentieth century as the Great Annihilator. Those two massive and enigmatic objects, Sag West* and the Annihilator, had long before swept this innermost core of the Galaxy’s central bulge clean of most stars and gas.

  The cavern was not quite empty, however. Periodically—every ten million years or so—in-falls of gas from the molecular cloud ringing the Core spiraled in to the cavern’s heart and coalesced in a dazzling spray of new star formation, a short-lived starburst, relatively speaking, as the infant stars were then drawn on to fiery and tortured deaths in one or another of the Core singularities. Evidence of past star-burst periods was still visible as ghost remnants of exploded stars, and by the handful of thinly scattered survivors of the hungry singularities isolated by distance.

  Here, too, were worlds, those clots and crumbs of matter at the Galactic Core too small to accumulate mass enough for a star. Some were gas giants, others rocky or icy bodies ranging from earth-sized worlds down to sand and gravel, all barren and radiation-seared. Many had been transformed into cometlike objects with long, silvery tails as the radiations of this place blasted atmosphere or subliming water vapor into space.

  And there were worlds—or things—stranger still: a neutron star flung from the Core eons past at incredible speed, made visible by its wake through the dense plasma of the Core, a tail one hundred light years long; great arcs of plasma that looped and plunged through heaven, some reaching thousands of light years out beyond the Galactic poles and delineating the Galaxy’s magnetic fields of force; the tattered remnants of ancient explosions that must have given the entire Galaxy a quasar’s brilliance.

  Against so vast and yawning a chasm, against such arresting cosmic splendor, it seemed incredible that Intelligence could manifest itself in any visible way. Even on worlds like Earth, where the megopoli sprawled inland from the coasts for hundreds of kilometers and the sky-els stretched from the equator far out into space, it was possible to look down from orbit and be hard-pressed to see any sign that Man had left his mark on the face of the planet at all. Here, the scale was vaster by many orders of magnitude, and yet Kara could see definite hints of… order… and of artifacts vast on a superhuman scale. Most of the stars remaining within the Core cavern were stragglers, randomly adrift, and yet some…

  Kara, frankly, was having trouble ordering and processing all that she was seeing. The scale of this place, immense beyond human comprehension, had left her a little dazed and feeling very small. The very large in the nat
ural order of things she could accept, even appreciate, but the artificial nature of some of what she was seeing was stunning, even crippling when it was suddenly revealed to any mind programmed through human scales and values.

  With an effort of will, through the link established by her personal Naga fragment, she could shift her center of awareness to any surface of the vehicle or receive visual input from a full three-sixty in three dimensions. Looking astern, she could see the slender, gleaming silver thread of the Gate the reconnaissance force had just come through. As straight as a laser beam, it stretched like a razor’s slash across more than one thousand kilometers, a two-kilometer-thick cylinder containing the mass of hundreds of suns, packed to densities approaching those of a neutron star, then set to rotating about its long axis at relativistic speeds. The process warped the spacetime matrix in its vicinity, opening countless hyperdimensional pathways. Kara and the others of the Phantoms had followed one of those paths to reach this place, located some twenty-five thousand light years from the worlds known to Man. The largest structures devised by human engineering were the sky-els that connected the surfaces of most human-inhabited planets with their synchorbitals, but the tallest of those, though considerably longer than the Stargate, were insubstantial wisps of gossamer in comparison to that space-rending colossus.

  Yet even the Stargate paled by comparison with the scale of some of the engineering evident in this alien place. Here, entire stars were being moved, herded from place to place like immense, grazing animals, the process evident in their regimentation, in the geometrical perfection of their alignments with one another. She could see stars arrayed in circles, in polygons, in precisely ordered clusters, as though they’d been penned awaiting some deferred judgment.