Jackers (27 page)

“Colonel, that was a magnificent performance!” Smith enthused. “Congratulations!”

“It was Dev here who pulled it off, sir,” she said. Enthusiasm bubbled, barely suppressed.
She was alive… and so was he!
“He pinned enough of the brute’s PDLs that I was able to get a charge placed.”

“Well, you did everything you said you’d do,” Sinclair told her. “Preliminary reports have the rest of the Impie striders in full retreat. This’ll hold them up for another day or two at least. We all owe you, owe you both a tremendous debt.”

She looked at Dev. “Did you bring reinforcements from Athena? How many?”

He shook his head. “Sorry, Katya. I’ve already gone over this with these gentlemen. When I heard that a Ryu-class was going to get here before me, I sent the fleet elsewhere. To bring it back here would have been suicide.”

“Surely it would be better to try!” A cooler rationality reasserted itself then, smoothing over the warm flush of victory, and survival. “Okay. No reinforcements. At least we have a breather, now. But I’m not sure it helps us much. Even if they only brought one crawler, it won’t be long before their strider force wears us down. And we have no place else to go.”

“But we do,” Sinclair said gently. “Katya, it’s time to carry out the rest of the plan. We’ve got to leave, for Herakles.”

She stared at Sinclair for a moment, uncomprehending. Tired to the point where she could scarcely stand, with the pulse of combat still thrilling at her temples, the general’s words didn’t at first make sense. Leave? Now?

After she and the people with her had suffered so much, had invested so much in defending this place?

“Most of the delegates slipped out just ahead of the invasion,” Sinclair explained to Dev. “They should be nearly at Mu Herculis by now. They took Fred with them.”

“How many more do you want to get out?” Dev asked.

Sinclair glanced around the room at the others. “Senior staff,” he said. “Myself… though I hate like hell abandoning ship in the middle of this.”

“You
have
to go, sir,” General Kruger said. Unlike Smith, Grier, or Sinclair, he was unshaven and his uniform blotched with dirt and sweat. The militia general had been in the field almost continuously since the invasion had begun. “We’ll keep fighting the bastards here. They’ll have to level every damned mountain in the Outback to root every last one of us out.”

Katya felt cold. The exultation of victory had soured.

“That’s… it then? We’re just leaving?”

“We have no choice, Katya,” Sinclair said. “Now, people, I can’t stress enough the need for complete secrecy. We will be limited as to how many people we can take out. Captain Cameron has only a single ship. This evacuation will be restricted to only absolutely essential personnel—”

“Excuse me, General,” Katya said. “But what about the Rangers?”

“We’re going to be too tight for space,” Dev pointed out.

“We can bring out a few of your best people,” Sinclair added. “We’ll need them for the nucleus of a new 1st Confederation Rangers, on Herakles.”

“You’ll have a couple hundred troops to work with,” Dev said, grinning. “Remember, I stole half of your Rangers for the Athena raid.”

“That’s not the point! I can’t just abandon my people here!” Emotions seethed as rigidly held self-control cracked. She could feel the tears on her cheeks, the stinging in her eyes, but she didn’t care. “My… my place is here! I can’t go with you!”

“I’m sorry, Colonel,” Sinclair said gently. “But you must. That’s an order. You and Captain Cameron are the only two people who’ve had more than cursory contact with the Naga so far. And we’re counting on you to establish contact with the Heraklean Naga.
Everything
depends on that. Do you understand?”

She looked at Dev, who stared back at her with a hard, level gaze. “Linked,” she said. “But it’s one goking hell of a way to run a war.”

Hours later, she entered the encampment set aside for the genies, nearly ten kilometers down the slope from the landing field. It was almost full dark, though Columbia shed a blanket of cold, silver light across forest and looming mountain face. The sky was empty, and there was no threat on the southeastern horizon save the pale skyglow of Jefferson.

It was almost possible to forget that there was a war.

“Wait for me,” she told the jacker of the magflitter that had brought her here, then opened the bubble top and stepped off into the brisk evening air. Squaring her shoulders, she got her bearings, then strode toward the main gate.

She was dreading this encounter.

A young soldier in armor stopped her and demanded her palmed ID before admitting her to the camp. The site itself was little more than a clearing lined with hastily erected plasform barracks half-buried in dirt and roofed over by meter upon meter of nanoflage sheeting. There were no open lights, no fires. The building she was looking for was at the end of what might generously have been termed a street.

The camp’s official name was Bravo-three-seven, though the troops quartered there had taken to calling it Camp Baka… Camp Fool. Most of them were local militia, though this one round-roofed building housed the Port Jefferson Scouts. A guard—a human—admitted her past the guard station at the front door.

With the front door sealed off by a blanket hanging from the ceiling, there was light inside… and music. She was embraced by both as she stepped into the warmth of the barracks.

… and Nagai had withdrawn.

But Morgan called us to his side, Hegemon infantry.

And let us choose to stand and die, or choose instead to flee.

The words and rhythm of “The Ballad of Morgan’s Hold” pounded at her. Inside the curtain was a typical military barracks, lined with bunk beds and lockers and occupied by perhaps fifty people. Katya was surprised at the number. Only eighteen genies were carried on the Scouts’ muster list at the moment, and so far as she knew no more were due to join the tiny genie outfit.

Then she realized that most of the people in the room were full humans.

One of the humans was jacked into a mentar, which he held in his lap, eyes closed as his thoughts shaped the chords falling from it in rippling, pattering trills. The rest were singing along.

We disobeyed our orders when they said to sound retreat.

And Morgan laughed and said “My God, we’ll see who’s the elite!”

For fighting steel had broken faith, the samurai had fled.

But Morgan’s men defied Nagai, they stood and fought and bled.

Coincidence—and biting irony—bemused her. “The Ballad of Morgan’s Hold” was an infantryman’s song from long before the rebellion, one commemorating a heroic last stand on, of all places, Herakles. A handful of troops, of
crunchies,
under the command of Captain David Morgan, had held off wave after wave of Xenophobe attacks after the
Taisa
Nagai had ordered the defenders to evacuate the planet. Their stand had allowed untold numbers of civilians to evacuate up the Heraklean sky-el.

Warstriders did not make that stand, it was the infantry

Who stood and fought and died and paid the price of mutiny.

We took our stand on Argos Hill, four hundred fighting men.

And when the smoke had cleared away, sixteen walked down again.

So caught up in the song were most of the men and women in that room that Katya had not been immediately noticed.

“Attention!” someone shouted suddenly, and the words and music dwindled away. With a clatter of motion, people started coming to their feet.

“Carry on,” Katya said. “I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

It had taken her a moment to realize just what it was that was bothering her about the sight. It was the intermingling of genies and full humans, something she’d not seen since bringing Tharby and those first few genies to Stone Mountain. Especially after that one rape incident, there’d been so much prejudice among the humans she’d thought they would never accept the gene-tailored workers.

Then she realized something else. Of the humans present, none had more than Level 1 hardware—palm circuitry and a single T-socket behind one ear. Some of the humans, judging from the length and style of their hair, didn’t even have that much.

Nulls. Katya had rarely had much to do with Nulls, a growing lower class unable to interact in economic or long-range AI transactions. There’d always been a certain small percentage of humans who couldn’t accept the nano-grown cerebral implants or skin circuitry, and there were more who refused the cybernetic enhancements on religious, philosophical, or political grounds. Frequently unemployable save in menial jobs, they were largely invisible to society as a whole. The military used them in nontechnical slots, as leg infantry, and for lifting, loading, storing, carrying…

The sorts of jobs genies were frequently employed in.

Nulls frequently felt the same sort of gulf between themselves and socket-equipped citizenry. Perhaps they felt closer to the genies, who were also Nulls, than they did to technically augmented full humans.

With a small, inner start, Katya realized that the entire group was watching her, waiting for her to speak. Within the stratified rigidity the Confederation was inheriting from the Hegemony Guard, officers did not casually drop in on their troops; striderjacks did not associate with crunchies.

Maybe that was a large part of what was wrong.

She noticed Tharby, sitting on the floor next to the mentarist. She’d learned from others already that it was Tharby and four other genies who’d taken down the Tachi at Anversen; she’d intended to seek him out, to commend him for what he’d done, to thank him… and to tell him she was leaving. With the entire room watching her, that seemed to be the cowardly way out.

“Excuse the interruption,” she told them all. “I just came by to say… to say that I’m being ordered out. I’m sorry I can’t take you with me. And I—I’m sorry I can’t stay here, with you.”

“Where you off to, sir?” Tharby asked. During the past few days, the genie’s use of military courtesy had improved. His language had improved as well, becoming smoother, more… human.

She shook her head. Many of the soldiers here might well find themselves under Imperial interrogation soon. “Another star system. That’s all I can tell you.”

“Why we not go?” a big worker genie in the back called. “We fight Impies good!”

“Yeah!
Gok
’em!” another chorused, and then the barracks walls were ringing with answering shouts and catcalls.

When the room was silent again, or nearly so, Katya tried her best to answer. “There’s only room for a few, and that’s saved for the people the topjacks say have to go. And… and they need good people to keep fighting the Impies here.”

“Ha!” a full human said. “Well, it figures, don’t it, tokes?”

“Like always,” a
ningyo
said nearby. Cradling a Pk-55 flechette rifle, she looked sleekly dangerous.

Tokes.
The human soldier had called the genies tokes…
guys.
Or maybe he’d been referring to everyone in the room. Same thing. He was including the genies as part of his circle of comrades.

Then Katya understood what it was she was feeling here. The Nihongo word was
yuyo,
which meant camaraderie, but which for soldiers throughout the Hegemony had taken on the special meaning of the warrior’s bond, that special relationship shared with men and women who’d faced privation, loss, and death at your side.

The genies had proven themselves in battle. They’d been accepted.

“We have good friends here, Colonel,” Tharby said, almost as though he’d just read her thoughts. “We will stay and fight the Impies. Thank you, for everything… and good luck.”

“Thank you, Tharby.” She had to fight back her tears. “And good luck… to all of you.”

Turning, she pushed through the curtain, then stopped. She could not resist a parting lesson for her students. “You know, Tharby, what you did today was incredibly brave. It was also incredibly stupid. Lots of warstriders have antipersonnel charges or
sempu
blasters to kill people who try the sort of thing you did.”

The genie grinned at her, golden eyes laughing. “Stupider than finding a place for
us
with full humans? I don’t think so!”

“Good-bye, Tharby.”

Turning, she fled into the night.

A burst of laughter and good-natured gibes followed her. Seconds later, they struck up the final verse of the song. Outside, she could no longer hear the words, but she already knew them by heart.

At golden Tenno Kyuden they cannot begin to see

That honor’s price is paid in full while glory can befree.

So give a cheer for Morgan’s crew, the God-damnedinfantry,

The men who fought the Xenophobes, the grunts likeyou and me.

Katya had never felt so torn. Duty required that she follow orders. Her
yujo-
bond and the responsibility she felt for those in her command demanded she stay. Besides, this was her world, her home. Could she simply turn her back on it all?

Yet Dev was going to Herakles. And Travis Sinclair. Damn! Simplest was to accept the bonds of military discipline. She’d been ordered to go; she would go.

But
gok
it was hard.…

Chujo
Tetsu Kawashima pulled himself hand over hand into
Donryu’s
bridge space, positioned himself within the embrace of an empty control linkage module, and strapped himself in. Food and waste feedlines snapped home in his shipsuit connectors, and a pair of large plugs jacked home into the T-sockets behind his ears. His palm touched the interface, and his surroundings vanished, replaced by the squadron’s Combat Coordination Center.