Warstrider: Jackers (Warstrider Series, Book Three) (10 page)

"
Kuso!
" It was almost a wail. "What hope have we, then?"

"Ah, but they
did
win, remember. Eventually. Through perseverance. Through learning from their mistakes . . . and by making fewer mistakes than did their enemy.

"And always remember, Katya, that the past is never repeated exactly. Its patterns might repeat, but never the particulars, never the details. You and your 1st Confederation Rangers, you might be our analogue to that first Continental Army. But with an understanding of our own technology and strengths and abilities that those early Americans never had, we've got a chance, a fairly
good
chance, to beat the Imperials before they really take notice of us and decide to step on us like bugs. Hell, all
we need do is convince them that it's easier and cheaper to let us go without a fight. In the long run, you see, that's how
all
revolutions succeed." His eyes had gone vacant for a second then, as he consulted some inner data. "Blast. You've let me ramble, girl. We should be getting back to the floor. I have a weakness for history, Katya. You shouldn't have let me run on so!"

But Katya routinely downloaded to her personal RAM all of Sinclair's "ramblings," as he called them. Often she played them back in the quiet of her quarters during off-duty hours, and lately she'd begun editing, organizing, and cataloguing them into a history, of sorts. Sinclair's intense, almost archaic love of the peoples and issues and events of past times helped weave a framework against which Katya could hang the events she saw unfolding around her now.

As she stepped off the slidewalk and bounded up the steps of the Sony Building, she found herself remembering again that particular conversation and wishing that Dev were here so she could download it to his RAM and discuss it with him afterward.

If only Dev could hear some of this! It might well give him the perspective he needed to understand the
rightness
of the Confederation's cause. They'd often disagreed in the past over what the Confederation was trying to do, over whether or not it was worth the cost.

She suppressed a small, inward shudder that mingled both hope and fear. Dev must be on his way back from the Daikoku shipyards by now. Was he still alive? Never mind the success or failure of his mission,
was he still alive
?

She found she very much wanted to see him again despite all that had happened to drive them apart, and the power of that wanting caught her by surprise.

Katya palmed the ID reader at the entrance to the Congressional Hall. Tired and feeling thoroughly dirty, she'd just come straight from a twenty-hour session with a new
shipment of warstriders. They'd belonged originally to Nowakiyev, fifteen machines donated by that colony's militia nearly a year ago and kept in storage since then on the outskirts of Port Jefferson, the spaceport outside of the planet's capital. They were ancient pieces, some of them; the most modern was a hulking KR-9 Manta manufactured at Earth's Toshiba Orbital in 2531, twelve years ago and already bordering on obsolete.

The oldest? Ah, that would have to be the pair of T-90 Gunwalkers. They'd come off the assembly lines a full century and a half ago, and what a record they had! They'd served in the Osiran uprising, and later in the colonial militia on Shiva. The Shivans had sold them both to Nowakiyev in 2501, when news of the first Xeno incursions on An-Nur II had created war panic and invasion hysteria across the Frontier.

The Ukrainians had contributed those fifteen striders to the then Greater New American Defense Force, a unit long since disbanded. Now, thanks to the political strains between New America Colony and the other two settlements on the world, there were unexpected problems. Spare parts needed to get those machines on-line were not to be had. Katya also needed nanopattern technicals, the complex data bases that described a piece of equipment virtually molecule by molecule, allowing repair and service nano to be programmed to carry out their assigned operations on that particular machine.

Sinclair had more pull than most with the disparate elements of the New American delegation. Perhaps he could help.

She arrived in the Hall, as she usually did these days, in the middle of a firestorm of debate. For the past month or so, discussion had centered on the issue of genies, on whether or not they could be—or should be—accorded the rights of full humans. That fight had waxed hot, with Liberty and Rainbow taking opposite poles on the issue and attempting to batter the rest of
the delegations, by words if not by force, into choosing one side or the other.

Ten days ago that issue had been tabled. There were signs of growing strains within the fragile Confederation. The Emancipator Party of Liberty had demanded an addition to the Declaration, one proclaiming those supporting genie slavery to be "outlaw states, unworthy to sit with civilized men." In reply, the Rainbow delegation had threatened to walk out if genies were allowed to vote or given representation in Congress. Sinclair and the other moderates had hoped to give both sides some time to cool off and consider their positions . . . and options.

What followed, though, had exploded even hotter, a nova's flare of recriminations and ill-feeling. Why was it, colonies like Nowakiyev and Canton and Deseret wanted to know, that the hotheads of sister colonies like Liberty insisted on complete dissolution of all ties with the mother empire? The Reconciliationists, as they were coming to be known, wanted to effect a repair of relations between the various Frontier worlds and the rest of the Hegemony. Surely, reform could be won through negotiation, while the only result of war would be the absolute and total destruction of everything Man had built on the Frontier.

Palming her ID into a final security station interface, she waited for the door to dissolve. Duane Lassiter's 3-D image dominated the central display in the amphitheater beyond. A delegate from the Frontier world of Eostre, he spoke Inglic; a wholehearted Reconciliationist, he spoke with desperate, articulate passion.

"Do you actually believe," he was saying as Katya entered the Hall, "that a mere handful of systems can survive on their own, with no trade with the Hegemony? Cut off, isolated from the rest of humanity . . . for mark me, such would be the fate of worlds who turned against their brethren.

"Worse, would war with the Hegemony pit New Americans against Cantonese and Ukrainians in a bloody
civil war, brother against brother, father against son? The fratricide of civil war, I tell you, has always been the bloodiest, bitterest, and most genocidal war of all. . . ."

Katya tuned out the speech as she descended the walkway to the seating area of the New American delegation. She'd heard that speech, or variations on its themes, time after time in the past month, and each time the words conjured images of her parents, and the rift between them and herself.

The Reconciliationists made a powerful point: it would be better to live in peace with Empire and Hegemony. The only trouble was, who was going to get the Empire to agree to those terms? "The Emperor has declared us to be in rebellion," Sinclair had announced during one memorable reply to a recent Reconciliationist speech. "Perhaps it is time that we did as well!"

But still, the talking, the wrangling went on.

She slipped into the seat next to Sinclair.

"Katya!" he said, half turning. "It's been a while. I thought we'd lost you!"

She blinked back tiredness. "If you do, General, it's because I've gone sound asleep in one of my striders. Switched off and powered-down. Can we talk?"

"Now?"

"Any time in the next couple of hours."

"That might be a good idea," he said, his brow furrowing with concern. "Go up to my office and take a nap. You look done-in, lass. Tsuked out."

She managed a smile.
Tsukarasu
was the Nihongo for tired, "tsuked out" a recent and popular bit of derivative Frontier slang.

"
Shinda
-tsuked," she said, adding the Nihongo word for "dead." She held up her hands, stained so black from silicarb and lubegel that the interwoven wires of her embedded interface seemed to gleam against her left palm with a light of their own. "I may never be clean again. But anyway, I can't really afford the nap. Thanks just the same. Actually, I could download what
I need to your desk system, or maybe talk it over with your analogue."

Sinclair's analogue was a computer program duplicating enough of his memory and personality to serve as a standin and personal secretary during routine ViRcommunications and conferencing. Under most circumstances, it was impossible to tell an analogue from the human himself.

"Hell, Katya, you don't want to talk to him. He's got delusions of grandeur, complete technomegalomania. C'mon. We'll talk now . . . but only if you'll promise me to get some sleep. I can't afford to lose you, you know."

"General, with all due respect, you don't know what you're asking. I—" She stopped. The Hall had just gone very quiet. A military officer was now in quiet, urgent conference with the speaker. The silence lengthened, then dissolved in a gradually expanding ripple of low-voiced murmurs.
Something
was happening. But what?

"Fellow delegates," Lassiter said after a long moment had passed. "I, uh, I've just been given rather disturbing news. A large, a—uh—a
very
large Imperial war fleet has just been sighted dropping out of K-T space on the boundaries of our system. Initial reports are fragmentary at best, but the word is that elements of the local militia space forces challenged the fleet and were swept aside. The fleet is now en route to New America and is expected to arrive within twenty to thirty hours.

"It seems the Imperials are responding to the challenge, gentle people. They've come to debate the question of independence with us in person."

"
Kuso!
" Katya groaned. "And just when you'd about convinced me to take that nap. . . ."

In pre-spaceflight days, air superiority was the watchword for the massive military contests on the ground in Europe and the Middle East, even those where heavy armor was the deciding tactical arm. Dai Nihon's conquest of space gave a new dimension to the tactical balance: space superiority. Today, it is axiomatic that control of a planet's surface can only be achieved throughcontrol of circumambient space
.

—
Armored Combat: A Modern Military Overview

Heisaku Ariyoshi

C.E
. 2523

Donryu
meant Storm Dragon, and she was flagship of Kawashima's Ohka Squadron. Nine hundred meters long, massing nearly two million tons, she was a
Dai Nihon
dragonship, one of only nine such vessels in the entire Shichiju. Though she was as swift within the K-T plenum as her smaller consorts, in normal space she had
a maximum acceleration of less than half a G and a combat maneuverability that led her crew to call her
o-yuseisan
, "honored planet," or, in a more bantering tone,
Shiri-omo
, "Heavy Ass." Indeed, her core shielding had begun service as a small, nano-shaped planetoid, and her crew of six thousand was larger than the population of some outpost worlds.

In combat, however, she was not expected to maneuver. Her vast size reflected the massiveness of her Quantum Power Tap; she could generate a harmonically tuned singularity pair massive enough to leak 10
¹³
joules through her skyscraper-sized converters—some ten thousand gigawatts per second—most of which was required simply to move her ponderous bulk through space. More than enough energy was left over, however, to power her batteries of charged particle and neutron guns, and the exhaust of her plasma drive alone could theoretically sterilize a planet. Her primary long-range weapon, however, was the carrier wing of
sentoki
, the sleek, highly maneuverable air-space interceptors popularly called space fighters.

There was nothing,
nothing
throughout the Shichiju to match these Ryu-class carriers. They'd been conceived and constructed during the first four decades of the twenty-sixth century, when the Imperium recognized that the Xenophobes posed a serious threat to humankind but still believed that the alien foe must possess some sort of powerful space fleet in order to spread the Xeno infestations from world to world. That theory had been disproved by the Alyan Expedition, of course, but the
Ryus
remained a visible symbol of Imperial power, prowess, and invincibility . . . and the ultimate threat to any challenge of Imperial authority.

There would be no further challenge of that authority, not after 26 Draconis was brought back into the Hegemony's fold.

Jefferson was dissolving into chaos. Though the government's first impulse had been to withhold from the
public the news that an Imperial fleet was in-system, word had leaked out within minutes through a hundred separate sources. Now, mobs of people filled the parks and walkways between Jefferson's archaic glass towers, like brightly colored rivers lapping between blue and silver cliffs. A giant towered above them; a five-story display screen raised along the side of the Weiler Building overlooking Franklin Park was replaying Duane Lassiter's announcement of the fleet's arrival. As Katya crossed the park, the image of the Eostran delegate seemed to be speaking directly to her, even though she couldn't hear the words. For that, you needed a newslink feed pressed against your palm interface, or, if you had T-sockets, a ViRcom plugged in and tuned to the appropriate channel. Half of the city's population, Katya estimated, must be 'faced in by now, as the world's news services downloaded megabytes of news, sound, picture, and virtual reality, to the panicky crowds.

Katya was amused, in a sour way, that the news services, which had taken surprisingly little interest in the proceedings in the Hall of Congress during the past weeks, had been out in force since Lassiter's announcement. Reporters and sensors for all the major ViRnews downloaders had invaded the former Sony Building, seeking sensory downloads from anyone who'd had anything to do with the proceedings in the Hall of Congress, but most especially with General Sinclair.