Rebellion

by William H. Keith

  Those attitudes had spread to the half dozen or so worlds of the Shichiju where colonists of American descent had tried to resurrect some measure of their imagined past glories. Worlds like New America, Katya’s homeworld. She might have been raised in that planet’s Ukrainian colony, but she’d obviously been infected by the positively ancient, conservative atmosphere of the place.

  All things considered, Dev thought, the Empire was at worst a cumbersome and unwieldy bureaucracy, but at best the instrumentality that had made Man’s outreach to the stars, even his very survival, possible. In his firm opinion it was both. For him and his family, the Empire had long been both blessing and curse.

  To begin with, Michal Cameron had been forced to divorce his wife when he won his appointment to the Imperial Navy. Command officers, those ranking captain and above, were expected to marry for political advantage and to mingle within circles defined by the Imperial Court, and Mary Jean Pruitt-Cameron—a gaijin girl from West Scranton who couldn’t even speak Nihongo—simply hadn’t been of the proper social class. A new marriage had been arranged for Michal by the Emperor’s Council of Protocol.

  Even so, Michal had been allowed to retain his former wife as mistress, and he’d been able to provide for his two sons. Dev would never have been able otherwise to acquire his hardware, an NOI Model 10,000 Cephimplant, with left-palm-embedded control interface, twin temporal sockets, and a cervical receiver for direct feedback work.

  Without those high-priced C- and T-sockets, Dev Cameron would never have shaken free of Earth or the Hegemony Protectorate Arcology. He would have been just another of the hundred million BosWash citizens plugged into recjack feeds and living on the Fukushi dole, the welfare handouts provided by the government to its unemployable citizens.

  After his father’s disgrace and suicide, Dev had nursed a black bitterness toward the Empire, but he’d not been able to maintain such personal hatred toward so large and impersonal a system for long. From Dev’s point of view, it was his father’s enemies who had rigged the court-martial’s outcome, not the system. The Empire was far, far larger than any individual citizen, larger even than the Emperor himself.

  His father’s disgrace had very nearly ended his own career as well, and before it was properly started. He’d already received his appointment to the Hegemonic Naval Academy at Singapore when word of the Lung Chi disaster reached Earth, and the appointment had been quietly revoked after the court-martial, “to avoid unfortunate repercussions to the Academy’s reputation.” Ultimately, Dev had taken working passage aboard the freighter Mintaka to the Frontier just to escape the onus of his father’s name, but that could hardly be blamed on the Empire, could it?

  Nor was it the Empire’s fault that, after joining the Hegemony Guard on Loki, he’d been selected, not for ship training as he’d requested, but as a striderjack.

  All his life Dev had wanted to be a shipjack, and he’d picked up plenty of experience aboard the Mintaka, jacking everything from cargo handlers to second helm. Even now he still found it surprising that, after years of dreaming about Cruising the godsea as a starship, he’d ended up jacking warstriders. He’d never wanted anything to do with the lumbering fighting machines, the heavy mobile armor of twenty-sixth-century warfare, and had always looked down on the men and women who ran them. It had taken a hard-fought campaign against the Xenophobes infesting Loki, followed by the four-month voyage to contact the DalRiss symbionts of distant Alya to convince him that it was the people who counted in a fight, not the technology, and certainly not the outward form of his cybernetic prosthesis. He was proud now of his skill at handling LaG-42 Ghostriders or ponderous Warlords, and he rarely thought anymore about jacking starships.

  Dev had changed a lot in the past couple of years, in his attitude and in his relationships with other people. Once he’d been stiff, suspicious, even hostile with those he didn’t know, a loner who insisted on doing things his own way. Now he got on well with everybody… nearly everybody, at least. Katya’s rejection still burned. He’d loved that fiery Ukrainian company commander—still did, if the turmoil he was feeling now meant anything.

  A chimed note interrupted increasingly bleak thoughts, shaking Dev from a gloomy contemplation of the cloud-swathed Earth below. Someone was asking for a ViRcom link. He concentrated on the mental formula that unlocked the communications circuit in his cephlink implant.

  The thought materialized his analogue ViRpersona, attired in dress blacks and with the Imperial Star at his throat. In his own mind, he stood, seemingly unmoving and unprotected in open space, Earth beneath his boots, the gleaming thread of the sky-el dwindling with the perspective of distance against the clouds below and the star-dusted night above.

  “Chu-i Devis Cameron?” The woman’s voice seemed to speak from emptiness beside his left ear.

  “Yes?”

  “Excuse the interruption, sir, but Taisa Kukuei Tsuru desires immediate ViRcom linkage. Will you accept?”

  “Of course.”

  The rank of taisa was equivalent to a colonel in a planetary militia, but rank was less important here than position. Tsuru, Dev knew, was an Imperial Liaison, one of some tens of thousands of Japanese officers who served as links between the Imperial government and the Hegemony military forces. Their word carried the mass of official orders, even when delivered to ranks nominally superior to their own. Theoretically, a raw sho-i, if he were a liaison officer, could give orders to a Hegemony general, though such a situation would never be allowed to occur in practice simply because senior officers could not afford to lose face. The sho-i might advise that general, however… and the general would be expected to listen carefully. Imperial Liaisons carried considerable political clout.

  Their own name for themselves was Annaisha, “Guides.”

  Tsuru’s ViRcom analogue, the “public mask” presented through ViRcom linkages, was tall, trim, and fit in Imperial blacks resplendent with gold braid and decorations. Though he’d never met the liaison officer formally, Dev had seen him once in the flesh—at another of Kodama’s parties, as a matter of fact. He knew that the real Tsuru was a corpulent slug of a man, only seventy-five centimeters tall and still massing at least 130 kilos.

  It was more pleasant to deal with his AI-generated analogue.

  “Konichiwa, hajimemashte,” Dev said formally, bowing. He was guessing that Tsuru was on Singapore time, which was now mid-afternoon. Konichiwa was the appropriate polite greeting for any time between mid-morning and early evening. “Cameron des.”

  “I know who you are, Devis Cameron,” Tsuru’s image replied, his Inglic fluent, precise, and curt. “Your orders have just come through.”

  “Hai, Tsurusama.” He used the very polite -sama honorific and bowed again. He tried to mask his excitement and his curiosity, both of which could be construed as bad manners. Besides, he could sense a hard edge, an undercurrent of trouble, perhaps, locked behind the bland and emotionless mask of the Liaison’s analogue.

  “Operation Evening Calm has been approved,” the image said bluntly. “You are to take charge of the field phase of the project, effective immediately.”

  Dev’s heart leaped. Wonderful!

  “Thank you, Tsurusama. But where, please—”

  “Eridu.” The analogue’s dark eyes regarded him without emotion. Information, meanwhile, unfolded in Dev’s Implanted RAM. Eridu, he noted, was Chi Draconis V, twenty-five light-years from Sol.

  “Thirty days ago,” Tsuru continued, “several Xenophobes broke through to the surface near Winchester, the capital city. There has been fighting, and casualties. Until that time, the only activity noted on the planet was some minor seismic disturbances and a few cavern traces fifteen thousand kilometers from the nearest human colony. Eridu’s governor has requested immediate Imperial support.”

  Which meant military support. Damn! “But if fighting’s already started…” Dev began, hesitant.

  “Your orders will explain everything,” Tsuru said. “Stand by for direc
t RAM feed.”

  Dev manipulated the necessary codes in his mind. Data flashed across the ViRcom interface, flowing from Tsuru’s AI to the random-access memory of Dev’s cerebral implant. He saw that it was marked gokuhi, “secret,” and could be scanned only through the use of his personal authorization code.

  “Feed complete,” Dev said. “Sir, I wonder if—”

  He stopped. The ViRcom interface had been broken from Tsuru’s end, a cold and bluntly discourteous ending to the conversation that left Dev uneasy. Was the Imperial Liaison worried about link intercepts? The Imperial Staff and the Court at the Tenno Kyuden, the Palace of Heaven, itself had far more than their share of intrigue and politics. Was that what was behind Tsuru’s curtness, a need for secrecy? Or something more?

  Hesitantly, he unfolded the electronic text orders in his mind.

  Yes! Yunagi had been okayed, its funding approved by the Colonial Affairs Council! He was being attached to the office of Eridu’s Imperial Governor; he would report to Chiji Prem himself, though his immediate military supervisor would be a Hegemony Colonel, Emilio Duarte, of the 4th Terran Rangers. A fast courier, the Hayai, was being put at his disposal to get him to Eridu that much faster.

  He forgot Tsuru’s manner, forgot the pain of Katya’s leaving, as he thought about what this would mean for his career. He felt as though everything that had happened to him in these past few years would at last be given meaning.

  Man had been at war with the Xenophobes for forty-four years, ever since the first surfacing on the colony world of An Nur II in 2498. Only last year, however, with contact with the alien DalRiss, had he begun to learn just what it was that he faced.

  They were called Xenophobes because it was assumed they feared or hated all other life forms, an assumption that Dev had personally learned was not true. In fact, the Xenos were not even aware of other life forms; they reasoned in a curious black-white, yes-no world of Boolean logic and had trouble even perceiving the existence of creatures such as humans. They lived deep within the planetary crust, a kind of group mind, two-kilogram “cells” resembling black gobs of jelly linked together like the neurons of a human brain, but filling underground caverns that spanned hundreds, perhaps thousands, of kilometers.

  They absorbed rock—though they seemed to prefer the purer elements and components of human technology—to reproduce, and to hollow vast caverns for themselves in the depths, where they metabolized the heat of the planet’s core. Their life cycle spanned worlds and eons. When a planetary crust was riddled with tunnels and enmeshed in the webwork of a single organism that called itself the “One” and that humans called the “World Mind,” it hurled cell-colonies into the emptiness of the Great Void, protected in shells that rode the magnetic winds between the stars; after millennia, some few of those seed pods might be drawn to suitable worlds with the magnetic fields and core heat the Xenos found comfortable, there to begin all over. There was no communication between one Xenophobe world and the next.

  And perhaps strangest of all, their worldview was inverted from that of humans. They saw the universe as an infinity of rock, with the Great Void a hollow emptiness within.

  This much Dev had assimilated on the DalRiss homeworld when he’d encountered a Xenophobe One and touched it with the organic communicator called a comel on his arm. He’d learned that the One was extremely intelligent, though the nature of that intelligence might well be beyond human grasp. He’d learned that it responded to attack—perceived as the loss of some of its scattered parts—by striking back with technologies assimilated from other species on other worlds ages ago, and transferred from World Mind to World Mind through the passages of each generation.

  And he’d learned that the Xenophobe World Mind of Alya B-V, say, had nothing to do with the Xenophobes infesting Loki… or Eridu. Each was distinct, sundered by light-years of distance and many thousands of years in time. The World Mind, the so-called “contemplative phase” that was no longer struggling to integrate itself throughout the planetary crust, did not even think of the earlier “acquisitive phase” as intelligent, though there was plenty of evidence to the contrary.

  All of which meant that Dev had not ended the war simply by talking with one contemplative-phase Xenophobe. For peace to be won, humans would have to seek out the Xenophobes of every world they’d infested and contact them independently.

  And that was precisely what Operation Yunagi was all about.

  Chapter 3

  The Xenophobe War is like no other conflict in Man’s bloody history because, for the first time, his opponent is a complete unknown. In past wars, at least, the enemy was human, his science known, his reasons for fighting rational or at least intelligible, his worldview comprehensible. After four decades of war, however, the only motive we can ascribe to the Xenophobes is hatred or fear of other life forms—hence their name. Some researchers go so far as to suggest that their thought processes may be so alien to ours that we may never understand their reasoning.

  —The Xeno Foe

  HEMILCOM Military ViRdocumentary

  C.E. 2537

  The Imperial courier Hayai was waiting for Dev at Bay Three, Berth Seven, a stubby, thirty-meter lump of out-sized power tap converters and receptor nacelles capped by a heavily shielded crew module smaller than some life-boats Dev had seen. Captain Tokuyama, a small, wiry man with a clean-shaven scalp, greeted him at the docking tube.

  “Konichiwa,” Tokuyama said, extending a reader for Dev’s palm interface. He wore rather shabby green coveralls bearing, not military insignia, but the patch of the Sekkodan, the Imperial Scout Service. He shifted easily to Inglic. “You must be my special cargo.”

  Dev pressed his hand to the reader, transferring identity data and the relevant part of his orders to Hayai’s artificial intelligence. “I guess so. I’m afraid I still don’t know why the rush. I thought they would send me out on a starliner, or at least aboard a regular military transport.”

  Tokuyama grinned mirthlessly. “And when you get to Eridu they’ll keep you waiting until the next starliner catches up with you, and you find you could have made the trip in comfort after all. I know the routine well, O-nimotsusan.”

  Dev chuckled and gave the captain a wry bow. Nimotsu was Nihongo for “baggage,” and even with the polite construction and the suffix meaning “honorable” it was an unflattering but accurate assessment of Dev’s status aboard the courier.

  Eridu was the fifth world of Chi Draconis, an F7 star twenty-five and a quarter light-years from Sol. Typical passage time for a Tsukai-class fast courier would be anywhere from twelve to sixteen days, depending on the skill of its five-man crew.

  Unfortunately, the Artificial Intelligences aboard fast couriers rarely had much in the way of simulated diversions for passengers. Most of their capacity was reserved for navlinks with the ship’s helmsmen, and there was little to spare for “honorable baggage.” Two weeks for the K-T portion of the voyage, plus time for in-system maneuvering; no matter how he looked at it, Dev was in for an extended period of mind-numbing boredom.

  Dev wished he’d had time to pick up some long-run ViRdramas at some Singapore Orbital shop. He did get permission from Tokuyama to access the ship’s ephemeris. Memorizing data on Chi Draconis V might not only be useful at his destination, it would help pass the time and let him emerge at the other end still sane.

  Four hours after he’d boarded the Hayai, Dev was outbound from Earth at a steady three-G boost. Swaddled in a bodysuit and hooked into mechanisms that kept his physical self fed, hydrated, and clean; sealed inside a tank of heavy fluid that helped ease the strain of constant high-G acceleration; Dev began marking the time as best as he was able, immersing himself in research.

  He went carefully through his orders again first, of course. From a close reading, it was evident that Yunagi had been approved by a relatively small majority on the staff. He’d expected that, after the trouble he’d had winning some of them over to his side. Many simply didn’t believe meaningfu
l communication with the Xenophobes was possible at all. Others were politically motivated. Gensui Munimori, he knew, and a number of others, were openly hostile to gaijin, preferring only Japanese to work on potentially high-prestige projects like this one.

  Operation Yunagi was, of itself, fairly straightforward. A number of DalRiss comels, budded from the comel that he’d used to talk to the Xeno World Mind on Alya B-V, had been prepared in laboratories on Earth. When Xenophobes were discovered on another human-colonized world, the comels would be shipped there.

  Ideally, the attempt to communicate should have been tried before humans and Xenophobes clashed on the target world; according to Tsuru, it was too late for that on Eridu, and that aspect of the plan may have been unrealistic to begin with. It was hard to keep colonists from shooting at something that persisted in snacking on city domes, power plants, or warstriders. In fact—Dev’s arguments before the Imperial Staff had stressed the point—it might only be possible to approach Xenos on a world where active fighting had already broken out, simply because there was no way to get at the ones that were still kilometers underground.

  Perhaps the biggest unanswered question was whether or not he could even get close to an acquisitive-stage Xeno without being killed.

  That was a question which could not be answered until he tried.

  Dev didn’t like looking at that aspect of Yunagi too closely, though he’d watched enough Xenos to be pretty sure he’d be able to at least approach the things, once he found some on the surface. He filed that for later, and tapped into Hayai’s ephemeris.

  Linkcode accepted. Datafeed commence—

  Stellar Data: Chi Draconis

  Type: F7 V, mass 1.25 Sol, luminosity 3.0 Sol, stellar radius 1.13 Sol.

  Planetary system: six major bodies, including one Earthlike world (V) located within the star’s habitable zone.…

  Planetary Data: Chi Draconis V (Eridu)