Jackers (9 page)

Dev understood perfectly what Lloyd was saying. He’d heard much the same from General Sinclair, back on Eridu.

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 government body.…

Those words, downloaded from Dev’s RAM, hit him with a sudden and unexpected power, as though he’d never really read them before. Human culture was diverse, but the stronger any government was, the less it could tolerate diversity. Freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of thought… all were at heart antipathetic to any government big enough and strong enough to believe that it knew what was best for its citizens.

“That’s what they’re fighting for,” Dev agreed slowly. “But with twenty-some Imperial warships on their way to New America, I’m afraid the fight may be about over.” It seemed pointless for Dev to deny his interest in the world any longer.

“Then you
did
come from New America! We’d heard who-was, rumors, that the rebels were holding some sort of big meeting out there.” He scowled. “Dev, the Imperials are going to take that system down, and they’re going to do it hard. If I were you, I’d avoid it. It’s not going to be a real healthy place to be.”

Katya!
Fear writhed within, fear for Katya, fear for other friends and people he knew who’d stayed behind. How to warn them?
Kuso,
there was no way, even if he could lay his hands on a fast courier. With a week’s head start, the Imperial squadron would get there long before he would.

Making his way to a nearby console, he brought his hand down on an interface. “Simone?”

“I’m here, Captain,” the computer tech’s voice replied in his head. “There’s a lot of data here, but it’s going to take a while to run through the possible access codes. And… I’m pretty sure there’s a ‘three-times-and-you’re-out’ watchdog. We could lose it all if I don’t hit the right—“

“Try
fugaku.”

There was the briefest of pauses. “That did it! We’re in!” Dev felt the flow of data unleashed by the password.

Not that access to all of the secret codes and IFF frequencies in the Shichiju could help now. There was no repealing the laws of physics—not even the seemingly magic laws of the K-T plenum.

New America was about to be hit by an overwhelming force, and there wasn’t one damned thing Dev could do about it.

Chapter 6

The country must have a large, efficient army, one capable of meeting the enemy abroad, or they must expect to meet him at home.

—The Duke of Wellington

C.E.
1811

It was still midmorning when Katya Alessandro emerged from the maglev station in the heart of Jefferson, took her bearings from a public infolink broadcast, and started across Franklin Park. The golden light of 26 Draconis A had just cleared the Ironhead Mountains to the east of the city and seemed pinned between the mountains and the gilt-edged scimitar of Columbia, New America’s large, close natural satellite, suspended overhead.

In fact, it would be midmorning for another several hours yet. With a day lasting just over eighty-three standard hours, schedules on New America had little in common with cycles of day or night. This was Katya’s favorite work cycle time to be up and about, however, and she’d decided to take advantage of it today, riding the maglev shuttle from the starport into the city rather than one of the more convenient—and faster—point-to-point public magflitters.

As she stepped onto the Park’s moving way, a cloud of bright-winged morninglories exploded from an amberbrush, chirruping raucously as though to welcome her… or to laugh at her surprise.

Surprising, too, was how
good
it felt to be home once more, finally, despite the lingering pain.

She’d been back to New America only one other time in the past eight years, and then briefly. It had been almost four months now since she’d returned to New America this time, though Katya had been working so hard for those months that she’d had little time for sightseeing or looking up family or old acquaintances. That, she thought, was probably just as well.

She’d never expected to return to the world of her birth at all. Katya had never been so happy as the day she’d finally won free of her parents’ farm outside of Nowakiyev and set off on her own. Her decision to mortgage eight years of expected future earnings in order to purchase her three-socket implants, her downloaded education at Jefferson, her determination to go into space, each had one by one snipped the ties binding her to her old home outside New America’s Ukrainian colony. Her subsequent decision to enter Hegemony military service, followed not long afterward by her whole-hearted defection to the rebel cause, had completed the break.

New America was a rich and diverse world, one shared by three separate colonial populations. Largest and most powerful was the North American colony, also and confusingly called New America, with its capital at Jefferson, but the south-hemisphere Cantonese and Ukrainian colonies together accounted for nearly half of the world’s population of some five hundred million. The American colony was one of the Frontier’s loudest proponents of independence from the Hegemony; the Cantonese were just as strongly loyalist. The Ukrainians, as they often were on political issues, were still stubbornly and loudly divided.

As divided as was Katya’s own family. Her father had been from Jefferson originally, but he’d never shared the New American ideals of self-government. The Hegemony had heavily subsidized his
nowagreebi
farm, after all, and his Ukrainian wife was adamantly opposed to what she called the anarchy of revolution.

Katya didn’t like to remember her father’s last message to her, four years ago, the one advising her not to send another ViRcom download, because they upset her mother so.

The hell with them both.…

Jefferson was both planetary capital and the provisional capital of the entirety of the new Confederation, and its spaceport, on the Dickson Peninsula twenty-five kilometers south of the city, was the world’s principal link with the rest of the Shichiju. Jefferson was thriving, far busier now than it had been eight years earlier. Though not so modern as some of the Imperial cities she’d seen on Earth, Pulau Kodama, say, or Tokyo itself, Jefferson had the bustle and energy of a city far larger than its population of almost one million suggested. There were no arcologies here, but gleaming, old-fashioned skyscrapers and office domes rising among sprawling parks choked by the native green-gold vegetation. The faintly out-of-date atmosphere was belied, however, by the thronging crowds flowing along the walkways beneath and between those buildings, and by the magflitters and other skycraft warbling overhead.

The city’s people were a cosmopolitan lot. Some wore the traditional kilts of the New American Outback, but most looked as though they’d be at home in any major Hegemony city, people in pastel skinsuits or coveralls or worker’s garb, businessmen in formal wear and shoulder cloaks, soldiers in uniform—both the brown of the Confederation and the gray of the Hegemony, interestingly enough—and even a scattering of the more exotic dress of other Frontier worlds. Not all within the crowd were full-human, either. Many of the figures in worker’s clothing were genies, thick-shouldered, long-armed dockworkers, many of them, or the small, lithe, silver-furred forms of techies.

Katya noticed a pair of warstriders—a couple of aging RLN-90 Scoutstriders with Confederation insignia on their pauldrons—standing guard in the park’s central plaza. Peacekeepers. When news of the Emperor’s death had reached New America, it had touched that world’s different populations in markedly different ways. There had been mourning; there’d been rioting. Calls to completely sever the Frontier’s links with the Empire had alternated with calls for reason, for caution, for reconciliation. Things had been quiet for the past couple of months now, but the Confederation Command Authority continued to keep a few striders on alert status, patrolling the city’s public gathering areas, just in case.

With a fine sense of irony, the towering, blue-green Sony Building looming high above Franklin Park had been taken over shortly after its former corporate owners had departed, its offices and central AI shifted from the business of an interstellar corporation to that of running a brand-new government. It was still called the Sony Building, in fact, but the corporate logo that had adorned the peak of the eighty-story building for nearly a century had been taken down. In its place glowing, holographic letters floated before the building’s facade:
FIRST PEOPLE’S CONFEDERATION CONGRESS.

Delegates from Frontier worlds across the Shichiju had been meeting here for months now, trying to hammer out a new government… or even just a common set of goals. For her part, Katya had had little time for politics since her unexpected promotion to colonel and assignment to the new-formed 1st Confederation Rangers. Even when she’d joined General Sinclair’s personal staff in addition to her other duties, she’d steered clear of the political debates raging now in the Confederation’s capital. Sinclair was the politician, she’d reasoned, and the man to deal with the fragmenting ideologies of fifty different cultures on a dozen separate worlds.

That had been changing, lately. For the past month Katya had been dividing her time almost evenly between the old militia barracks near the capital’s spaceport and the Delegates’ Hall in Jefferson. Her position on Sinclair’s staff gave her freedom to come and go pretty much as she pleased even when Congress was in session. It was a fascinating position to be in, giving her as it did a chance to watch an infant government in the making. At the spaceport, meanwhile, she was her old, apolitical self, busily organizing and training the warstrider unit recently designated as the 1st Confederation Rangers.

Technically, the 1st Rangers were commanded by Colonel Jacob R. Weiss, a New American who’d formerly been CO of the 1st New American Minutemen. Weiss was an excellent administrator and a fair organizer, but—as with most of the Confederation’s senior military people—he lacked experience in combat. For that reason, Katya was Weiss’s 2IC, his second-in-command, normally a position held by a lieutenant colonel. Sinclair had told her privately that when the Rangers went into combat, Weiss would receive a promotion, and she would take over the unit officially instead of merely in fact.

She was more than happy
not
to be in official command, for running a regiment was as new for her as jacking a warstrider in combat would have been for Colonel Weiss. The challenge was overwhelming at times. Most of Katya’s command experience had been topjacking a company, three or maybe four platoons of eight warstriders each, no more than thirty-two machines and—with the support, admin, and maintenance personnel attached to the company—a total of perhaps 150 people. The Rangers were a full regiment—three battalions, each of five companies, for a total of 480 warstriders and a total roster carrying twenty-five hundred names.

At least, those were the numbers on the Rangers’ TO&E. Glowing in the black recesses of some adminjacker’s linked mind they looked damned impressive, but Katya knew just how misleading the figures were. So far, the 1st Confederation Rangers mustered exactly 148 warstriders, half of them obsolescent relics, plus 867 men and women, of whom only 115 had three sockets, with the physical ability to jack a strider in the first place. Of those, seventy-eight had actually jacked a warstrider into combat.

Those seventy-eight, though, had seen plenty of action. Most were veterans of Raeder’s Hill, on Eridu. Some were from her old 2nd New American unit, and had experience fighting Xenos on Loki or with the 1st Imperial Expeditionary Force. Good people, all of them, shoulder-companions well disciplined and steady. They would provide the core of this new regiment, this new idea that Sinclair so wanted her to begin.

A purely
Confederation
army.

“You’re aware, aren’t you,” he’d asked her one morning recently, during a break in the debates on the floor of Congress, “that none of what we’re doing here is new?”

She’d just told him how much she admired his drawing organization out of vacuum, order out of the chaos that was the rabble of people, cultures, and causes that made up the Frontier.

“You’ve told me the original Americans went through something very like this… when? Six hundred years ago?”

“Seven hundred sixty-seven years, to be precise. At the very dawning of the First Industrial Revolution. The ancestors of the New Americans managed a revolution of their own, and against odds as great as those we face now. The scale was not so grand, perhaps, but the ideas, the causes, the hopes, they were much the same. One people—actually a collection of diverse and insular cultures, farmers, merchants, seafarers, scholars, frontiersmen, and God knows what else—seeking to express their own ideas of individuality and personal freedom while under the rule of what had once been their motherland. The mother had become tyrant, you see, and wanted to keep a firm hand on them. They’d grown, however. Living on the frontier had changed them, enlarged their spirits. As living on the Frontier has enlarged us. And the mother, like the Empire, could not afford to let them simply turn and go their away.”

Sinclair shifted in his seat, rubbing at his graying beard. “One of the biggest challenges those early Americans faced,” he continued, “was getting such a diverse group—thirteen separate and quite individual colonies—to work together. Each was jealous of the others… as Varuna or Nowakiyev are of New America, say. Many had particular grievances with one another over issues like trade or slavery, very much like Liberty and Rainbow.”

“Slavery? Slavery’s been outlawed for centuries.”

“What about the genies?”

The words had been soft, with no hint of reproach, but Katya’s face had burned… with embarrassment? Or shame? She’d never thought of the issue in quite that way before. For that matter, she’d rarely thought about genies, though she’d seen them countless times in Jefferson’s walkways and parks. On most worlds, and for the most part, they were a tiny minority, kept comfortably out of sight.