Jackers (21 page)

“Oh, we won’t have any trouble at all getting in,” Lara told him. “It’s the getaway that’s scaring me.”

And me,
he thought, but that was not a thought to put out over the link.

Thirty-three days earlier,
Eagle
had left Daikoku and the rest of the Confederation fleet. The raiders had not destroyed the orbital shipyard or the planetary base, though Dev had been tempted, and his orders from Sinclair had at least given him that option. If the Daikoku Yards were destroyed, Dev had reasoned, the Imperials might well not rebuild them, relying instead on their shipyards within the Sol system, bases that would be extremely difficult to get at. By leaving most of the station intact, it was at least possible that the rebels would be able to help themselves to its bounty again, sometime in the future.

They
had
grabbed every ship that could fly, however, and as many military consumables—missiles, shells, nano-D—as they could find and load. Those newgrown ships that were not yet operable, including the incomplete shell of the Kako-class cruiser, had been destroyed by timed charges releasing clouds of nano-disassemblers within their hulls, which stripped them down into crumbling, bare-metal skeletons in a matter of hours. The nanovats, too, had been contaminated by specially designed nano, viral self-replicators that entered the shipyard’s nanotechnic control modules and corrupted their programming. When the Imperials tried to start them up again, they would find the vats growing garbage instead of starship parts; the Yard’s entire maintenance and assembly facility would have to be zero-purged and reprogrammed before it could be brought on-line again, a process that might take a year or more.

The facility crew and marines, disarmed, had been marooned on the planet. There was an old mining habitat called Atlas some thousand kilometers west of the planet’s surface facility at Carlson, left over from the planet’s pre-Imperial days and abandoned when it became unproductive. As Dev’s people were busily stripping the shipyards, ascraft from the
Mirach
and
Vindemiatrix
had ferried the prisoners down to Atlas and left them there, first making certain there was food, water, and air enough in the hab domes to last them until the next Hegemony ships came by and picked up the SOS from their emergency beacon.

The personnel at Carlson itself were left alone; Dev had planned to take that facility as well, which was why he’d brought the warstriders aboard
Mirach
and
Vindemiatrix
in the first place, but they were no threat where they were, and if they ventured into orbit aboard their own ascraft, the Confederation ships could easily blast them long before they could approach the station.

With that implied threat hanging literally over their heads, the Imperials and the
gaijin
mining crews at Carlson had obviously decided to sit it out on the surface, and Dev had given orders that they be ignored. He couldn’t afford the trouble—or the casualties—of storming their base, and there was no military reason to do so.

All Japanese personnel on the orbital facility were taken to Atlas after routine questioning. The
gaijin
personnel, however, were given a choice—stranding with their Japanese masters, or a slot with the rebels. Randi Lloyd, the Hegemony
shosa
in charge of Guard personnel at Daikoku’s orbital shipyards, and thirty-two other new Confederation recruits had accepted Dev’s offer.

Dev had been disappointed that the number hadn’t been higher, but Randi had explained that the rebel cause was still unknown to most people in the Hegemony. The government hardly went out of its way to publish the Confederation’s side of things, and for most people within the Hegemony Guard, the rebels were nothing more than a ragged band of discredited malcontents, political agitators, and terrorists… if, indeed, they existed at all.

That belief extended to the Imperials as well. People who assumed they were fighting rabble often got careless, and carelessness led to mistakes.

Which, of course, they were counting on… that, and the AI codes and security protocols lifted from Daikokukichi’s computer. Lloyd’s help, Lloyd’s
treason,
might well prove to be the difference between success and failure.

The return journey from Athena to 26 Draconis had seemed to drag on forever, day following day in a slow-crawling procession. Dev had passed that time by spending nearly every waking hour linked in with
Eagle’s
AI; when he wasn’t actively participating in jacking the vessel home, he was running simulations, elaborate ViRdramas of what they
might
find when they dropped out of K-T space on the borders of the 26 Draconis system, given the size and strength of the Imperial force that had called at Daikokukichi.

Basically, the possibilities as Dev had worked them out boiled down to just two: either the Imperials had been able to move swiftly and decisively enough that they’d been able to seize Jefferson—and with it most of the Confederation government—within a few hours or days of their first landing; or the fighting would still be going on when
Eagle
arrived. The chances of the Confed forces blocking the Imperium’s local space superiority were so slim that
Eagle’s
AI wouldn’t even assign them a probability. Imperial forces
would
land; there was no way to stop that. The only question was whether or not they could crack the Confederation defenses and break all resistance on the planet within one week of those landings.

Of the two,
Eagle’s
AI gave a slightly higher probability—one of sixty-one percent, in fact—to a longer, more protracted fight. Engineering the invasion of an entire world with a population of half a billion people was a complex problem in both strategy and logistics. Unless the Nihon admiral in charge had been extraordinarily lucky, or the defenders had been extraordinarily clumsy, by D+7 the Imperials would control New America’s major cities and spaceports, including, of course, Jefferson itself, but enough of the Confederation armed forces and local militias would have been able to escape intact that they could almost certainly continue the fight, even if they were forced to become little more than guerrilla units scattered about in the New American Outback.

In fact, the world of New America was especially well suited to guerrilla warfare. Its native, human-compatible ecology would allow the defenders to live off the land; cities, farms, and settlements were not all enclosed within sealed and vulnerable domes, as on Eridu. The rugged, usually mountainous, often heavily forested terrain would shield the defenders both from warstrider patrols and, to a lesser extent, from orbital scans. Though Imperial victory was virtually certain in the long run, New America’s defenders could keep the fight going for years, so long as they had the willingness, the
heart
to do so.

That—the question of heart—was more than anything else what worried Dev as
Eagle
swam through the blue glory of the godsea toward far 26 Draconis. He remembered the political divisions within the Confederation Congress before he’d left, and wondered if the rebel government might not simply cave in when confronted by the full, crushing weight of Imperial space and ground forces. It was one thing to proclaim the benefits of full independence when the Emperor’s battlefleet was forty-eight light-years distant, quite another to proclaim them when that fleet was in orbit, its assault forces pounding on the doors to the Sony Building itself. All it would take would be a majority vote by the more timorous members of Congress, one agreeing to accept Imperial terms, and
Eagle
might arrive to find the Confederation government dissolved, its army disbanded, and the promise of Sinclair’s Declaration of Reason only a fading memory.

Dev was surprised to realize just how much he
didn’t
want that to happen. He still felt ambivalent about the Confederation’s chances for victory in the long run, but he’d learned something important from Randi Lloyd, from his decision to betray Empire and Hegemony.

With seventy-eight populated worlds to choose from, with the promise of unnumbered more worlds yet to be discovered and explored beyond the boundaries of the Shichiju, with the technology to create space habitats and orbital colonies entirely independent of the presence of Earthlike worlds, the Cosmos ought to be big enough for everyone, big enough for every group and culture and faction that had its own rules for living and its own goals to reach for.

Ought
to be. But Nihon and Earth’s Hegemony together were committed to controlling each offshoot of Humankind’s diaspora the way a parent Naga con-trolled its fragment »selves«. To maintain that control they needed to maintain conformity. Oddball sects and factions like the Disciples, the Randites, the Greenies, or the Church of Mind of God Universalists needed to be suppressed, or at least actively discouraged from spreading messages of personal freedom or of individuality or of resistance to governmental authority; Japanese thought, in management and in government, stressed the concept of
sodan,
or group consultation, whereby a consensus could be reached for which no individual need take full responsibility. Consensus and conformity were the keystones of Imperial rule, individuality its greatest enemy. From the government’s point of view, for its very survival, individuality
had
to be suppressed everywhere within the Hegemony simply to keep the assembly of human worlds and cultures from splintering into countless, squabbling fragments.

Dev suspected that such had been the case for authoritarian regimes throughout Earth’s history; the disintegration of the Soviet Empire during the closing years of the twentieth century, the collapse of the Chinese state a half century later were obvious cases in point. That most such empires had originally been established—like the Hegemony—to keep the peace and protect their citizens tended to be forgotten in the trail of government-sponsored horrors aimed at promoting conformity of thought.

Sinclair had had much to say about individual liberties, Dev remembered. He’d downloaded Sinclair’s Declaration of Reason into his personal RAM, but over the course of the past few months he’d played it back so many times that the words had long since been burned into his organic memory as well. Much of that document, explaining why the Frontier worlds had to sever themselves from Imperium and Hegemony, was devoted to a single theme. No government, it stated, could unite the brawling, clashing, vibrantly discordant variety of human culture without mashing it all into a grim, gray sameness… and it shouldn’t be allowed to try. Was that a principle worth fighting for, no matter how long the odds?

Dev now knew that it was. Randi Lloyd’s decision to help the Confederation force at Daikokukichi had impressed him with just how very much there was at stake in this struggle.
If anything stops the Shichiju from becoming a boring sameness on every world it possesses,
Sinclair had told him and Katya once, privately,
it’s the hodgepodge of wonderfully varied human cultures on every planet we’ve set foot on. Hell, they’re what keep things lively!

And Dev was convinced now that Sinclair was right. The odds were still damned long.…

Yoroshii.
He was in this thing now, and the hell with the long odds. The Confederation had no chance at all if he and all the other jigging chokies caught in the middle of this fight didn’t link in and download everything they had to the Cause. Even the Empire would have to admit sooner or later that no government, no matter how sprawling or massive or powerful, could be maintained for long against the active resistance of its citizens. The Shichiju was too large for any one government to control; when enough worlds realized that and demanded independence,
something
was going to give.

In the meantime, the New American raiding force had taken a big step to throw some mass behind the Confederation’s demands. A pity, Dev thought, that there hadn’t been a way to loose the Confederation’s brand-new navy against the Imperials at 26 Draconis.
That
would have shaken Imperial complacency!

It would also have been suicide. Though Dev had played through hundreds of tactical simulations to check his initial feeling, he’d been certain from the beginning that the new Confederation fleet could not seriously challenge Ohka Squadron. Hell, that dragonship alone might prove too much for one destroyer and twenty-odd frigates, corvettes, patrol boats, and assorted small stuff… and it didn’t help at all that most of Dev’s people were little better than newbie recruits. Most had jacked ships before, but few had been in combat. Too, they’d been stretched damned thin among the captured vessels; some of the officers and crew on the smaller ships would be standing watch-and-watch all the way to their destination.

If he couldn’t challenge the Imperial squadron at New America in battle, then, he would have to find another way to get past them. Before leaving Daikoku, he’d assembled his battle staff and the commanding officers of his force in
Eagle’s
conference lounge for a marathon planning session, discussing alternatives.

Most had recommended that the raiding force return to New America and challenge the Imperials. Understandable. The majority of them were New Americans; it was their homes and families and friends that
Donryu
was threatening, and the need to go back and do something,
anything,
was an almost palpable presence in the compartment.

In the end, though, Dev had exercised his command authority and overidden the majority’s recommendation; there would be no attempt by the raiding force to engage
Donryu
or her escorts at New America, not when such an attempt would mean almost certain destruction. Instead, he’d left the captured fleet, as well as
Mirach, Tarazed,
and
Vindemiatrix,
at Daikoku, all under the command of Jase Curtis,
Tarazed’s
CO.