Jackers (20 page)

A shout from one of the buildings. Soldiers emerged, prodding three civilians, two men and a woman, ahead with rough caresses from gun butts and muzzles. The sign on the building’s front indicated that it was a travel agency, but that meant nothing. Those three must have simply found it a convenient place to shelter from the storm. Troops, faceless in their black armor, lined them up in the street. Orders were barked, too far for Katya to understand. One of the men struggled as a marine grabbed his arm.

They scuffled, and then the struggle was ended by a piercing crack; the man collapsed, rag-doll limp, onto the pavement. More orders… and the two remaining prisoners began stripping off their clothes with desperate haste. Soldiers roughly searched prisoners and clothing, then, both bare-handed and with palm-sized circuitry detectors. Katya understood. A deadly weapon could be designed to be insignificantly small and cunningly hidden beneath skin or within a body cavity. Apparently, the searchers found nothing. A final command, and the prisoners were led, naked and with wrists bound behind their backs, down the street toward the waiting Zo.

At a range of some fifty meters, Katya could not tell whether the prisoners were genies or full humans.

With that realization came another. Did it matter?

She decided that it didn’t. At the rate the search party was moving, it would reach
The Newamie’s Down
in an hour or less. She’d seen no indication of sentries posted by the genies, not even the commonsense of a lookout on some convenient rooftop. When the Imperials reached them, all of the genies there would be slaughtered… or led away like those two captives to uncertain fates in an Imperial internment center.

Katya knew that she could easily avoid that patrol. Knowing where it was, what direction it was moving on, gave her a tremendous advantage. She could circle around behind, cut across to another street, and be on her way north in minutes. She owed the genies nothing.…

But she couldn’t do it. The whole question of whether genies could be considered human had become meaningless for Katya as soon as she’d met them. If not as intelligent as most people, they spoke, they reasoned, they discussed. Some had treated her with hostility. Others had shown kindness… or at least a willingness to listen, which was more than could be said for some full humans she’d known. For some reason, she was reminded of Pol Danver.

Besides, she felt an almost parental responsibility for them. She’d seen how they’d been hurt—abandoned by their creators, then slaughtered by an enemy they didn’t even understand.

She couldn’t simply leave the survivors to be killed.

Grimly, quietly, Katya began retracing her steps.

The events of the next few hours proved to be anticlimax. She’d walked back in the front door of
The Newamie’s Down
without even being challenged, to find the argument still going full blast. Genies, she decided, were chokies, as long in the tongue as any member of the Confederation Congress. Was
that
built into their genes, she wondered, to keep them from working together, or was it a trait left over from those strands of human DNA in their cells that remained untampered-with?

She’d walked in, steel coil-tight, ready to break and run if she were attacked. The genies’ reaction, though, was almost comical. Tharby had gaped at her, as astonished at seeing her as he might have been at the repeal of some law of physics. Dak had blustered, threatening her with the still-safed combat rifle, while the others had simply stared. She’d stared both of them down.

“I came back to warn you,” she’d told them. “There are Impies four blocks from here, coming this way. They’re searching every building and rounding up everyone they find. There’s a stilter with them, a big one.”

That news had ended all debate with the decisiveness of a gunshot. The majority of the genies by that time had already decided that their best bet lay in fleeing Port Jefferson, then making their way south to Nowakiyev.

They scattered, some through the building’s front door, the rest through other exits. Dak went with them, still clutching the “broken” rifle.

Ten, however, including both Tharby and the
ningyo
Sonya, had decided to follow Katya to Newamie lines. There was no mention of the earlier threat to kill her; perhaps her warning had changed their minds about “holders.” Perhaps they felt gratitude.

Or perhaps it was simply that they retained a few shreds of inborn loyalty.

Exfiltration from behind Imperial lines had not been as difficult as Katya had expected, even with ten civilians in tow. The invaders had still been less than organized at the time, fighting in small, tight groups rather than along a broad front with troops and combat machines arrayed with any kind of depth. Twice, the little party had taken cover in burnt-out shells of buildings as Imperial warstriders and marines stalked along the night-blackened streets outside, but the most dangerous encounter occurred when they were stopped by a nervous New American sentry.

They’d been lucky that the kid had actually challenged them instead of shooting first and checking their IDs later. He’d been young and inexperienced, armed with a bulky Mark XIV plasma rifle longer than he was tall, a clumsy weapon without its steady mount harness, but one that still could have wiped out the refugee party with a single burst as effectively as a blast from an Imperial
sempu.

Playing it safe, Katya had “surrendered” to the kid, who was not at all sure that she was not Japanese, then downloaded her ID and current orders to the New American intelligence officer who’d eventually shown up to interrogate her.

Five hours later, she’d been on her way to Stone Mountain.

The rebel forces still clung to Jefferson, but CONMILCOM headquarters had been moved far to the northwest, to an underground bunker complex under Stone Mountain. The place had originally been tunneled out as an armory, a storehouse for Hegemony military supplies and equipment. With New America’s secession from the Hegemony, it had been seized and enlarged, until it served now as the new meeting place for the Confederation’s government-in-exile.

Travel by air was not safe with so many Imperial ascraft in the sky. Katya had made the trip by groundcar along little-used roads, and four times her driver had pulled off the road, sheltering beneath the feathery sway of New American trees as a flight of Imperial fighters screeched overhead.

She’d been debriefed by Travis Sinclair himself, along with several other senior officers from CONMILCOM. To her considerable surprise, Grant Morton had been there as well. She’d thought the president of the Confederation Congress had escaped with the other pro-independence delegates aboard the
Transluxus.

Word of her escape—and her refugee charges—had circulated swiftly through the Confederation camp, attracting considerable interest among the government’s higher-ups still on New America. The genies’ reception in the Newamie lines, however, had turned out to be less than enthusiastic.

“It might not have been a smart idea bringing them across the lines, my dear,” General Dmitrin Kruger had told her, shaking his bald head. The others watched her, impassive. A viewall in the back was set to monitor Jefferson’s city center. Much of the capital was already in flames as Imperial forces pounded it from a distance. The Sony Building showed black gaps among glass windows, and Franklin Park had lost most of its trees. Katya thought of the morninglories there and wanted to weep.

“Indeed,” General Grier said, nodding. “They’re going to be more trouble than they’re worth.”

“But they
want
to fight!” she cried. Okay, so the genies weren’t trained. That didn’t mean they
couldn’t
be trained. Damn it, why were these men so close-minded?

“Yes?” Grier demanded. “And how much use would these, these constructs be against warstriders?”

“That’s beside the point!” Katya replied. She’d not forgotten that Grier had ordered a retreat before she’d completed her maneuver at Port Jefferson, but she tried to rein in her anger. “This is their world too! Surely they have the right to help defend it! To help fight for their own freedom!”

Grant Morton cleared his throat, and the other men in the room looked to him. Though no longer a military officer, he retained a keen interest in things military. Like Sinclair, he’d resigned his commission in the Hegemony Guard when his home district had elected him to Congress, but, unlike him, he’d not accepted a new commission in the Confederation armed forces. From what Katya had seen of his military ideas, that was just as well. He seemed to be something of a dilettante.

“Perhaps so, ah, Colonel,” Morton said, “though there’re some who’d tell you that if they don’t have the rights of humans, they don’t have the responsibilities either… like fighting for a freedom that they can neither understand nor ever hope to attain.”

“Why you bigoted, hypocritical—” Katya began, temper flared.

Sinclair interrupted her with an upraised hand. “Gently, Katya. No one here thinks that the genies shouldn’t have a say in this.”

“We are neither hypocrites nor bigots,” Morton told her bluntly. “We are simply practical men, doing our best in difficult times.”

“Exactly,” Kruger added. “There are, um, thorny political considerations in the question.…”

“Rainbow, you mean.” She’d heard plenty in the past few months about Rainbow, and its bitter feud with the Emancipator Party of Liberty and elsewhere. “Damn it. General! These are
people!
”

“Again, my dear,” Kruger had said, “not everyone would agree with you. In any case, remember that they were designed to be, um, less than brilliant, shall we say, and that they have no cybernetic prostheses. How useful to our cause could they possibly be?”

Katya had scowled her reply. Kruger tended to treat her with condescension, Morton as a nonentity.

“A word with you, Colonel,” Sinclair had said, standing up. “If I may? I think we’re about done here.”

“Of course, General,” Morton said, dismissing them. “Colonel. Thank you for coming.”

They’d excused themselves. Minutes later, when they were alone in Sinclair’s office, the general had turned on her. “That, Katya, was a very poor display of judgment!”

The words were like a physical blow. If she didn’t care for Kruger, Grier, or the rest, she
did
respect Sinclair.

“I understand the way New Americans think,” he told her. “After all, I’m one myself. We have within us a certain egalitarian spirit brought here by our ancestors from Earth, from North America, in fact. It expresses itself as a distinct lack of awe for anyone who is supposed to outrank us.

“But damn it, Colonel, you don’t talk back to generals, and you
damn
sure don’t call the president of Congress a bigot!”

“I’m… I’m sorry, sir,” she said. “I was out of line. I know that.”

“Sorry doesn’t link.” Sinclair had gone on to give Katya the richest chewing-out she’d had since she’d been a hojie, a raw recruit just entering basic training. He’d not raised his voice, he’d kept his cultured and good-natured poise, and he told her that he understood that she’d been through a lot in the past day or so, but he’d reminded her in no uncertain terms that certain military standards of discipline and professionalism had to be set… and kept.

“I cannot have officers in my command,” he told her, “who can’t muster the personal discipline to keep their mouths shut, when necessary, or who dive in blind and unthinking when only cold, hard-headed reason will serve.”

And just when Katya had been convinced that Sinclair was about to bust her all the way back down to lieutenant, he’d grinned at her. “So, Colonel Alessandro, do you have any ideas as to how we can use these recruits of yours?”

“Uh… sir?”

“Lecture over. Your penance, Katya, will be to come up with some way that we can use these people.” She’d blinked at him and he’d laughed. “Well, that is what you wanted, isn’t it?”

It was, and she’d given a lot of thought to the problem during her walk back to the Newamie lines. Still shaken by the dressing-down he’d given her, she began to explain her idea.

Chapter 14

We hold that the vast distances sundering world from world and system from system serve to insulate the worlds of Mankind’s diaspora from one another and from Earth, and that government cannot adequately bridge so vast a gap of time, space, and culture;

We hold that the differences between mutually alien, albeit human cultures render impossible a thorough understanding of the needs, necessities, aspirations, goals, and dreams of those disparate worlds by any central government.…

Further, we hold that human culture, economy, and aspirations are too varied to administer, regulate, or restrict by any means, but should be free, allowing each to thrive or fail on its own merits.

—
The Declaration of Reason

Travis Ewell Sinclair

C.E.
2542

The New American raiding force had departed from Daikokukichi within twenty hours of their victory there. Dev had been in a hurry to leave. Now they were into the last few hours before breakout, and Dev was linked into
Eagle’s
control system, watching the blue currents of the K-T plenum break past him, feeling their buffet against his ViRsimulated being.

“Dev?” Lara Anders broke into dark and circular thoughts. “Coming up on the final countdown. What’s the word?”

Dev considered, then gave the linked analogue to a heavy shrug. “We’ll have to play it like we planned it, Lara. Nothing cute, like at Athena. We just drop in like we have every right to be there.”

“I’m afraid I agree.” He could feel her worry. “But we’re running against damned long odds. I’d feel safer with the rest of the squadron at my back.”

“Which wouldn’t extend our survival time by more than a few minutes, right? This way, at least, we’ve got a chance. Instead of firepower, we’ll be counting on the hidebound blindness of Imperial bureaucracy. Given that, I’d say our chances are really pretty good.”