Semper Human. Ian Douglas

in eight hundred fifty years, in a collective culture that numbers in the hundreds of trillions of entities. Do you have any questions?

       Not yet. I don’t know enough to know what to ask.

       Okay. I’ve got a new download here. This one is mission specific. See what you think.

      A moment later, Garroway came up for air. “Oh, gods,” was all he could say.

      The Xul he’d known had possessed one striking weakness. Different nodes were slow to share data, and individual nodes could be slow—centuries, sometimes—in responding to a perceived threat. They also didn’t change. Tactics that had worked for millennia were not discarded, not changed, when opponents learned how they worked. It was one of the very few advantages Humankind had enjoyed in the long conflict, and the Marines had used it to their tactical advantage time after time.

      According to this new download, though, the very worst had happened.

      At long last, the Xul were adapting to the new situation with radically new tactics.

       Hassetas, Dac IV

       Star System 1727459

       1850 hours, GMT

      Garwe’s RS/A-91 Starwraith strikepod was more than a space-capable fighter, and more than Marine combat armor. Just two meters long, it was just large enough inside to accommodate a single Marine in coffin-like closeness, packed in acceleration gel and hardwired into the unit’s AI hardware. It was shaped like an elongated egg, with smooth-flowing bulges and swellings housing drive components and weaponry. Each was powered by a tiny quantum power tap, and used base-state repulsor agrav both for propulsion and to allow the craft to hover in place. They could not travel faster than light—Alcubierre Drive technology still required far more power than a ten-kilo QPT could provide—but they had virtually unlimited range and endurance. In one celebrated instance, a piece of Marine lore, a Marine named Micuel Consales had been stranded in a hostile star system by the destruction of the Marine combat carrier Vladivostok. He’d programmed the capsule to put him into deep cybe-hibe and accelerate to near-light velocity. The pod had been retrieved ninety-eight years later as it approached the nearest friendly base, and Consales had successfully been revived.

      That had been nearly four hundred years earlier, and the technology had improved since then. A strikepod couldn’t go up against a capital ship, but it was fast, maneuverable, and damned hard to track, which made it a key component in the modern Marine arsenal. They could also be handled remotely, in certain circumstances, which could be a real advantage.

      At the moment, Garwe and fifteen other Marines, each wearing an RS/A-91 strikepod, were approaching the Hassetas floatreef, which filled the sky ahead of them.

      One of the genuine shocks of galactic exploration had been the discovery that even gas giants like Sol’s Jupiter could harbor life. True, in an atmosphere that was mostly hydrogen, with no solid surface, with fierce electromagnetic radiation belts, and with wind speeds that could approach six or seven hundred kilometers per hour, that life was going to be radically different from anything humans were familiar with.

      But being different had kept them undiscovered by the Xul and other predators.

      Dac IV’s native civilization had arisen from a close symbiosis between two evolving life forms—the Krysni and the Reefs.

      The Reef was a vast bubble of tough but extremely light tissue, thirty kilometers or more across, and from a distance appearing as insubstantial as a soap bubble. Hanging below like rain shadow beneath a thunderhead was the living part of the Reef, a kind of aerial jungle growing on and within the tangled mass of tentacles trailing beneath the main gas bag. Exothermic chemistries heated the hydrogen within the gas bag, providing lift; hydrogen jets provided some directional movement, enough, at any rate, to let the vast creature steer clear of downdrafts that would drag it into the ferociously hot, high-pressure depths of the atmosphere.

      Within the floatreef’s remote evolutionary past, the tentacles would have evolved to capture smaller, more maneuverable fliers passing through the reef’s shadow. Now, they were an immense and inverted forest providing habitats for tens of thousands of species. Hanging among the thicker tentacles were feeder nets, sheets of closely woven tentacle-threads that filtered organic material out of the atmosphere. Modern floatreefs were skygrazers, inhaling clouds of sulfur- and phosphorus-rich, locust-sized drifters called irm, the Dac equivalent of plankton or krill in distant Earth’s oceans.

      It was an evolutionary panorama relatively common throughout the Galaxy. A majority of Jovian-type gas giants possessed life, it had turned out, and the environmental constraints required that life to follow more or less similar patterns of form and function. The ten-kilometer montgolfiers of Jupiter had first been discovered late in the twenty-fourth century.

      Far more rarely, gas giant ecosystems evolved intelligence. In Jupiter and most other gas giants, intelligence was an unnecessary luxury; grazers didn’t need much in the way of brains to inhale clouds of drifting organics. But in Dac and a few hundred other gas giants discovered so far across the Galaxy, competition, the need to anticipate and avoid storms and downdrafts, and the elusive nature of local food animals had led to sentience at least as great as that of the extinct great whales of old Earth, and often to minds considerably greater and more powerful.

      In Dac, according to the mission briefing downloads, there were at least two intelligent species living in close symbiosis—the floatreefs themselves and the Krysni.

      Lieutenant Marek Garwe hovered vertically now in his Starwraith, half a meter above the deck of the Hassetas visitor tree house. The platform, constructed entirely of materials imported from distant, more solid worlds, was a good two hundred meters across, anchored against one of the major trunk-tentacles, three-quarters shrouded by the tentacle forest, and including a ramshackle assortment of buildings designed to accommodate each of seven or eight major biochemistries. Officially, the tree house was the offworlder compound, the reception center and living quarters for official delegations from other worlds to Dac. Currently, there were 224 visitors to the gas giant, including 57 humans of various species. The offworlders included Associative representatives, cultural liaisons, xenosophontologists and other scientific researchers, and formal diplomats.

      Facing the twelve Marine wraiths were some tens of thousands of angry Krysni. Exactly what they were angry about had yet to be established. The call from the Dac offworlder compound, though, had been urgent, almost panicky. Four offworlders, all of them humans, had been killed by a sudden rising among the Krysni, and the remainder were terrified that the same was about to happen to them. Anchor Marine Strike Squadron 340 had been deployed from Laridis, some three hundred light years distant, to Tromendet in the Dac IV satellite system two days before. As the situation in the gas giant’s upper atmosphere deteriorated, the War Dogs had been ordered in.

      The Marines floated above the compound deck, now, facing the tentacle jungle, a near-solid wall of intertwining tubules ranging in size from main trunks nearly a hundred meters thick to slender threads, writhing and twisting in a constant background of motion. Within the net of tentacles were masses of Dacan—or, more properly, Hassetan—flora: pinkweed, Dacleaf, methane bloom, gas pods, and myriad others, most either orange or purple in color, with smaller amounts of pink and red. And it was within this wall of mottled and rustling vegetation that the Krysni mob had sequestered itself, shrieking in their piping, hydrogen-thin keenings and whistlings, the calls a cacophony of furious invective and hate. What the hell, Garwe wondered, had gotten into the simple-minded creatures?

      “Hold your fire,” Captain Xander ordered. “Let’s see if they’ll talk to us.”

      “I don’t know, Skipper,” Lieutenant Palin, Blue Five, said. “They don’t look very friendly.”

      A single Krysni looked a bit like a terrestrial octopus about a meter long, but with a body that expanded or contracted at will like a variable-pressure balloon. Like their huge co-symbiote, the floatreef, they were balloonists, suspended from organic sacs of body-heated hydrogen that let them drift in the upper Dacan atmosphere, their