The Complete Inheritance Trilogy: Star Strike, Galactic Corps, Semper Human. Ian Douglas

or just possibly because they’d been in the process of returning and been brushed aside by this giant just as it emerged into the Starwall system.

      To a monster like the Xul Nightmare, those probes must have been insignificant, dismissed as drifting fragments of meteoric debris. On that scale, Lee’s FR-100 was little larger; so long as she didn’t change her vector, she should be ignored.

      Should be. So much about the Xul—both the limits of their technology and the leadings of their psychology—still were utter unknowns.

      But it’s so far, so good, she thought, watching the monster slide past in the distance. She was glad she’d told Chesty to steer her closer to the ringwall, though. Had she emerged from the Gate near the center of its opening, she might well have slammed headlong into the ass end of that thing.

      That didn’t let her out of the woods, though. If she applied power to decelerate in order to reverse course and return to the Gate, the Xul monster might easily pick up her energy signature; scraps of interstellar debris did not reverse course on their own, nor did they radiate the clouds of neutrinos that were the waste product of tapping the virtual energy of the Quantum Sea.

      Lee felt a small shiver at the base of her neck, a prickling warning of danger. If she couldn’t reverse course, she would die of radiation poisoning in short order. And, even if she did reverse course … the Xul Nightmare’s presence suggested that the Stargate on this side was now attuned to a different star system. If she went through, she would not emerge at Puller 659, but in some other unguessable but absolutely guaranteed remote location. Chesty could retune the Gate for a return, of course; the Puller 659 Gate’s coordinates were programmed into him.

      But that would be a rather nasty give-away to the Xul here at Starwall, who would certainly be monitoring the Gate’s settings. Regulation One-alpha, drilled into every Marine standing duty at a Gate listening post, was to lay low and keep a low profile, to not attract Xul attention to human activities. Humankind had survived for the past eight centuries only because they’d managed, on the whole, to stay off the metaphorical Xul radar.

      “Chesty?” she asked. “Are you picking anything up from over there? Can you piggyback it?”

      “We are intercepting the usual RF leakage,” the AI replied. “I am attempting to locate a viable frequency with which to establish a tap.”

      Xul ships leaked, at least at radio frequencies. The millions of kilometers of nanoelectronic circuitry and processors packed into each of those immense hulls gave off a constant hiss and murmur of radio noise as a kind of metabolic by-product, and the Xul never seemed to bother with shielding. Some theorists suggested that the radio noise served an almost organic function, helping to reassure individual Xul ship-entities that others of their kind were near.

      Ever since the first studies carried out on the Singer eight centuries before, humans had looked for ways to turn this fact to their advantage. It was possible, for instance, to use some Xul frequencies as carrier waves, allowing human-developed AI programs to upload into a Xul computer network and have a look around. The technique was called piggybacking, and Marine listening posts often used it in attempts to gather yet more intelligence on the poorly understood and still mysterious Xul.

      There was an ancient aphorism, something all Marines learned in boot camp, something from the writings of Sun Tzu in The Art of War It stated that if the warrior knew himself, but not the enemy, he would be victorious only half the time. If he knew the enemy, but not himself, he would, again, be victorious only one battle out of two. Only if the warrior knew the enemy and himself could he hope to win every battle. …

      The Marine philosophy, begun in the crucible of recruit training, was designed to create a sure knowledge of self. Unfortunately, even after eight centuries, the Xul were still largely an utterly alien quantity. Xenocultural theorists were still divided as to whether the Xul could properly be called living beings … or even whether they were self-aware, both sentient and conscious in the same way that humans understood the terms. In most ways, they appeared to be machine intelligences, like human-designed AIs, but on a far vaster and more powerful scale.

      There were hints, however, that each Xul ship contained hundreds, perhaps thousands of organic minds patterned and downloaded into the vessel’s circuitry, separate identities arrayed in a gestalt, a group mind, in an interconnected collection referred to—ever since the discovery of The Singer—as a chorus.

      There were hints, too, that a Xul chorus included the downloaded minds both of the original, biological Xul, beings whose organic bodies had died and decayed countless millennia ago, and the minds of other intelligent beings captured and incorporated into the Xul matrix for purposes of interrogation … the Xul version of knowing both self and adversary. So far, the Xul definitely had the advantage in the arena of knowing, but progress had been made in that direction during the past eight centuries.

      As Chesty₂ was about to demonstrate. …

       Chestry ₂

       Starwall System

       1608 hrs GMT

      Unlike humans, the artificial intelligence, dubbed “Chesty” after the nickname of a legendary Marine of long ago, did not rely exclusively on vision to model his surroundings. Merging with the data streams flowing like myriad streams and rivers through the tightly packed and tangled electronic pathways of the alien vessel, the closest sensory analogue he possessed was that of sound.

      Human understanding of Xul mentalities had actually taken an enormous leap forward in the twenty-fourth century, when communications breakthroughs with dolphins in Earth’s oceans had helped forge a new understanding of how they perceived their watery surroundings as magical, somehow crystalline panoramas of sound rendered palpable.

      From Chesty’s point of view, he was slipping deeper into a vast and hauntingly resonant meshing of rhythms and harmonies, a blending of tones and pulses and throbbings and even voices in a shifting, ever changing whole that felt both self-directing and self-contained, but which also felt like a fragment, a discrete but dependent shard of something far larger, tantalizingly beyond the reach and scope of Chesty’s awareness.

      The trick was twofold—remaining invisible within that harmonic chorus while retaining the ability to probe and peer and penetrate, winkling out useable data from the incoherent ocean of information pulsing around him and recording it for later analyses. As he slipped into the Xul data stream, Chesty manifested a data shell around the essential core of his operating software, taking on the virtual appearance of a minor counterpoint to the thronging choral harmony about him. So long as he played the part and kept it low-key, he should be able to remain undetected. His distant ancestors would have recognized the technique at once. Chesty₃ was, for all intents and purposes, a computer virus slipping in through an unguarded back door.

      Key to the strategy, of course, was compatibility. The Xul was the ultimate in an alien operating system. Fortunately, there were only so many ways to encode and manipulate data, and both modern human computer technology and that of the ancient predecessors of the Xul shared essential basics. Both had begun, in their infancy, with the yes/no, on/off simplicity of binary, but Xul systems had later evolved the more adaptable yes/no/yes-and-no flexibility of trinary, similar in many ways to the fuzzy logic of the most powerful human systems.

      As a result, and beginning with the extensive code-breaking and reverse engineering projects carried out on the recovered corpse of The Singer centuries ago, human computer technicians had learned enough of the Xul operating system, communications protocol, and essential language to understand perhaps-twenty percent of a rich-content Xul data stream.

      Twenty percent … one word in five. In some ways it wasn’t much.

      But it was all Humankind had if it was ever to understand the nature of its Enemy.

      Moving through vast caverns of sound, then Chesty₂ sampled the currents, seeking matches for certain known concepts.