Warstrider: Jackers (Warstrider Series, Book Three) (3 page)

"Your orders will be carried out precisely as written,
Gensuisama
."

"I know,
Chujosan
. I have complete confidence in you. Now, if you would honor me by joining me for tea? . . ."

The room reserved for the tea ceremony was traditional, nine feet square and with a real door rather than a dissolving, nanotech panel, one so low that the celebrants had to go in on hands and knees, a holdover from centuries long past when such a posture spoke of mutual trust and of the leaving of pretense and pomp outside. It was impossible to enter while wearing the traditional two swords,
katana
and
wakazashi
, of the samurai.

Inside, a single scroll hung in its alcove above a simple arrangement of flowers. Through an open panel could be glimpsed the fir trees and moss-covered ground,
the garden and stone water basin, of a scene on Earth. So perfect was the illusion that Kawashima imagined he could smell the scent of pine needles behind the subtle haze of incense . . . and perhaps, he realized, that was programmed into the scene as well. The ceremony's hostess, a provocatively lovely
ningyo
, was on her knees in the garden, simmering water in an iron kettle over a charcoal fire, each motion one of delicate grace and economy of movement. Save for the lessened gravity, it was difficult to remember that this was aboard the synchorbital Tenno Kyuden, and not in some woods-shrouded teahouse in Kyoto Prefecture.

The conversation turned now to the formality of the ritual, outwardly reserved, inwardly relaxed as they commented on the kettles, pots, and bowls, on the scroll and flower arrangement, on the play of the hostess's hands as she carried out the ancient motions of preparing tea.

Kawashima felt ashamed, however, and unworthy. Munimori was extending to him a signal and conspicuous honor, but he found himself unable to leave worldly concerns and troubles at the teahouse door as custom required. His thoughts kept turning back to those intensely blue, pain-filled eyes he'd seen in the outer room.

He had no doubt whatsoever that the effect was a calculated one, deliberately staged for his benefit; Munimori was telling him in a manner much more direct and meaningful than mere words, that he, Munimori, was a man of singular power, one who could deliver honor and great reward with one hand, pain and disgrace with the other. The hostess knelt before him, beating his cha to near-froth with a whisk before bowing and offering him the porcelain cup. Bowing, he received it, but when he lifted the bitter green liquid to his lips he could scarcely taste it.

As a good officer, Kawashima had been aware of the talk spreading through the fleet, talk that had forecast the first order he'd received, that soon only those native to Dai Nihon could serve as fleet officers. There were
rumors of worse to come already circulating, rumors to the effect that before long only native-born
Nihonjin
would be allowed to serve in high military or government posts. Those rumors had already caused minor riots and popular demonstrations in Madras, Indonesia, and Anchorage. After all, to be accorded the privilege of Imperial citizenship without the attendant rights and status made the whole concept of Japanese citizenship rather pointless.

For centuries, Nihon had led softly, exercising her control over Earth and her offworld colonies through the instrumentality of the Hegemony, granting her subjects at least the illusion of sovereignty. Now, it seemed, the cloak was being thrown back, and naked force would be the order of the day. Could Nihon rule all of the human diaspora alone? And what of the nonhumans discovered so far, the Xenophobes and DalRiss? If the ways and thoughts of human
gaijin
were strange sometimes, what of those beings, far stranger still?

Kawashima was not confident of the answers to those questions and feared that Munimori and those in his clique were moving too far, too fast, in purging the Empire of
gaijin
influence.

He wondered about the civil war that seemed inevitable now, as Empire and Hegemony squared off against Confederation. The rebels had little in the way of naval power, but they were men and women drawn from the Frontier, the sixty-some worlds beyond the long-settled
Sekaino Shin
, the Core Worlds that included Earth. That meant that they were resourceful and that they were united by a burning anger at the clumsy and wasteful policies of a distant and unsympathetic government.
Hannichi
, they were called, disparagingly, anti-Japanese, as though the word were a synonym for "crazy." But Kawashima had witnessed
hannichi
sentiments firsthand only seven years earlier, during the Metrochicagan Riots. If the Frontier worlds fought as fiercely for their independence as had the people of Metrochicago, Empire and
Hegemony were facing a long and bitter war, one that would kill millions and devastate worlds. There would be little honor in victory over what, after all, was little more than rabble; in defeat—unthinkable!—would be complete humiliation.

Perhaps, Kawashima thought, that was why Munimori had presented him with the warning of the living sculpture. No art form, no expression of a master's will, is without pain. Munimori was telling him that he had the will and the determination to see this filthy conflict through to its inevitable end.

The significance of the tea ceremony was inescapable. Munimori was a steel fist, gloved within the civilized velvet of this ancient ceremony, of Zen simplicity, artistic appreciation, intellectual stimulation, and proper observance of ritual.

And Tetsu Kawashima was an empty vessel, nothing more, one that could do nothing but accept graciously the honor Munimori and the Emperor were handing him. He and his men would be the Empire's spear point against the Frontier rebels.

Politely, he held up his empty cup, commenting, as proper etiquette required, upon its age and delicate beauty. . . .

Basic to all combat is the concept of using an opponent's strength against him. Victory in any engagement, whether in a personal test one-on-one in the martial arts, or in the clash of the mightiest armies, absolutely depends on this
.

—
Kokorodo: Discipline of Warriors

Ieyasu Sutsumi

C.E
. 2529

The fleet emerged from the blue glory of the godsea, flashing into normal fourspace in a cascade of neutrinos. The rebel ships were deep within the target system, so deep that the enemy almost certainly picked up the quantum flux as space rippled from the K-T translation.

No matter. They would be through the target's outer defenses scant minutes behind the light-speed wave front announcing their arrival.

Nano-grown electronic traceries threaded through his brain linked Captain Devis Cameron with the
Eagle
's
AI, giving him a clear view of the planet ahead, as though he were dropping through empty space instead of sealed away within a high-tech coffin on the destroyer's command deck. Twin red dwarf suns glowed with ember-sullen light, a double sunrise above an airless, burnt-cinder world of rock and ice.

That star was DM+45° 2505 A and B, an unremarkable M3 double 29.14 light-years from New America, and 21 lights from Sol. Settlers from Rainbow had come here once, several centuries before, and named the place Athena. Too cold and small to be worth the expense of terraforming, it had riches enough—in platinum, indium, and rare earths—to attract a Frontier mining consortium, the same consortium that had founded Rainbow. Most of the settlers hadn't even been full-human; genegineered workers adapted to cramped quarters and cold, close working conditions were happier, cheaper, and easier to control.

Forty years ago, Athena had been bought out by Imperial Nihon, who'd promptly constructed a major shipbuilding facility in close orbit about the planet. The world's name was changed to Daikoku, god of wealth and happiness—also known as the Great Black One. The orbital station was
Daikokukichi
, Daikoku Base.

Through his cephlink, Dev felt the swift-flowing currents of data from
Eagle
's passive sensors, the telltale surge of energy indicating that Daikoku's defenses were powering up. Numbers scrolled down the right-hand side of his awareness, listing speeds and angles of approach. Dev absorbed the data,
feeling
it more than reading it, allowing the ship's AI to interact directly with his cephlink, calculating vectors, intercepts, and probabilities. He sensed the tingling wash of low-energy laser light. They were being scanned.

"That's it," Dev announced over the squadron's tactical communications link. "They've got us spotted."

"We're past the abort point now anyway," Captain
Lara Anders,
Eagle
's senior shipjacker, replied. "We're committed."

Pinpoints of light scattered across Dev's awareness, concentrated like a swarm of luminous gnats about the larger glow of the orbital station, and more were winking to life with every passing second. Each marked the lifepulse of a power plant. Daikoku was waking up.

The Confederation raiders were badly outnumbered.

They usually were. The civil war that was tearing apart the Japanese Empire's puppet Hegemony had been going on for well over a standard year now. More and more worlds of the Frontier had broken away, signing Travis Sinclair's Declaration of Reason in conscious, symbolic mimicry of the signing of a similar Declaration over seven centuries before.

With worlds to draw on, there were plenty of recruits, plenty of the raw materials, plenty of the nanomanufactories needed to transform those raw materials into warstriders and the other weapons of war. What the Frontier Confederation needed more than anything else in the unequal struggle for independence was
ships
.

For centuries, Imperial Nihon had maintained the virtual monopoly on space-based industrial facilities that it had enjoyed since the early twenty-first century. Like most high-tech artifacts, the individual pieces of ships—especially of the starships that allowed travel from world to world within the Shichiju in something less than centuries—were grown in zero-G manufactories and assembled in orbit. Most Confederation worlds maintained their own, homegrown fleets of intrasystem ships and ascraft, and a few like New America could even construct the power taps and K-T drive units necessary for faster-than-light travel.

But
Dai Nihon
still dominated the godsea passages between each of the gulf-isolated specks that was an inhabited world. The Imperial Navy, and in particular
the nine Ryu-class dragonships and their battlefleets, were simply unbeatable in any stand-up, one-to-one confrontation. The Frontier Confederation needed more and better starships. To get them, they needed to gamble the handful of FTL-capable ships they already had.

Eagle
was the Confederation flagship, formerly the Imperial destroyer
Tokitukaze
, captured by Dev during the Battle of Eridu and fresh now from repairs at New America's orbital yards. Spread out behind her were three converted commercial vessels, the hydrogen tanker
Tarazed
and the Commerce-class freighters
Mirach
and
Vindemiatrix
. They were fifth-generation K-T drive ships, three of the very few such vessels in New America's inventory, and all had been radically modified in the Newamie yards during the past six busy months. The freighters had been converted to lightly armed transports, each massing just over 25,000 tons, each carrying four air-space shuttles, five hundred armored troops, and a company of warstriders.

Tarazed
's conversion had been more radical. Originally designed to transport cryo-H, the tanker was huge, five enormous spheres strung like beads on a wire between a tiny bridge-hab module and the boxlike bulk of her mammoth drive and power section. Her lead containment sphere had been gutted of cryogenic gear and field generators and rigged with hab modules and a makeshift hangar deck. Airlocks grown through the hull gave access to vacuum;
Tarazed
carried as payload eighty-two warflyers, the equivalent of an Imperial carrier wing aboard one of their big dragonships.

Those three vessels, plus
Eagle
, were all that New America had been able to spare for the Athenan expedition. The rest of their space forces, including those being rushed in from other Confederation systems, were being organized against the probability—no, the
certainty
—of an eventual Imperial attack against the Frontier.

Raids like this one, directed against Imperial shipbuilding facilties across the Shichihju, were an important
source of new ships for the nascent rebellion. And possibly, Dev thought as he plunged toward the glittering constellation of lights that marked the Imperial ships and facilities orbiting Daikoku, just possibly such raids would buy the Confederation another desperately needed resource:
time
.

Chusa
Randin Bradley Lloyd was the senior Hegemonic Guard officer aboard the huge and sprawling orbital complex of habitats and nanofactories called Daikokukichi by the Imperials, but which most of the Hegemony personnel simply referred to as "the Yards." As he floated onto the main control deck and pulled himself hand over hand toward the link pods lining one bulkhead, he thought again about Tanemura and his fat toad of a flunky and bit off a sharp curse.

Lloyd had only two superior officers on the station, both of them Imperials.
Taisa
Tanemura was the base commander, while
Chusa
Kobo was CO of the facility's marine contingent. Under their direction, Lloyd was in charge of all of the base technical facilities, including both the sizable civilian population and the orbital defense lasers.

Senior he might have been, but he'd been having trouble lately applying that seniority in any meaningful fashion. Morale among the
gaijin
both in orbit and on the planet's surface was low, so low that Lloyd had had to seriously consider the threat of mutiny. Discipline among the petty officers and lower-ranking commissioned officers was almost nonexistent. Why work hard, why obey orders, when the Imperials seemed only to care about the color of your skin and the cant of your eyes?