Rebellion

by William H. Keith

  The uncertainties in the figures were due to the fact that the Tokitukaze was not an entirely predictable spacecraft. Large pieces were missing, and her AI was having difficulty assessing her exact current mass. Worse, once they hit atmosphere, it was impossible to predict exactly what she would do. The AI was vectoring them to skim Eridu’s upper atmosphere, perhaps two hundred kilometers above the surface, but they could easily skip higher… or plunge deeper.

  In any case, they would have a few precious seconds when they were in the sky above the fighting at the Babel Towerdown. If the fight was still going on at all, they might be able to throw a little of Tokitukaze’s considerable firepower on the side of the rebels.

  “Captain?”

  “What is it, Simone?”

  “We’re picking up the IFF and automatic call-sign IDs of the various units around Towerdown,” she said. “It’s all going through the ship’s AI and, well, I could give you a direct feed on the tactical situation.”

  Dev considered. They would have only a few seconds above the enemy forces. No human could react, aim, and fire with any kind of accuracy in such a brief space of time, not even with cephlink-boosted reflexes. Only the superfast optical circuits and electronics of an AI could juggle so much data in so little time.

  “Hang on a sec,” Dev said. He was watching the dwindling handful of seconds left until the final course change. Three… two… one… there!

  Silently, invisible plasmas stabbed into space at precisely calculated angles, slowing the Tokitukaze slightly, nudging her a bit closer to her target, and incidentally orienting her so that two of her three gigawatt lasers were facing the planet.

  Maneuver completed.…

  Twelve minutes now to perigee.

  Eridu filled most of Dev’s forward view, a vast globe of red and gold. He could make out the coastline of the Dawnthunder Sea now, and the convoluted twist of the Babel promontory. There were a lot of clouds. He’d not thought of that. Would they even be able to see the battleground? Jack that feed when we reach it. Was that the monofilament-thin gleam of the space elevator? Yes… he could just make it out where it caught the light of Marduk astern.

  The falling ship shuddered, skipping on the first tenuous fringes of atmosphere. The erratic and unpredictable bouncing their weapons platform was about to suffer would not make this any easier, might well make it impossible.

  “Simone? Go ahead. Give me a full tactical feed. And link all weapons through the AI.”

  Dev was braced, but the waterfall of data flowing through his cephlink was more than he’d ever tried to handle before. His view of Eridu was wiped away by the torrent. Shapes, lines, and mathematical formulas flickered and glowed in the complex depths of his virtual world. Eridu was there… its gravitational field so.…

  In his mind, he could see each unit, Imperial, Hegemony, and rebel, as colored masses, could see each individual warstrider as a tiny figure highlighted against that war-blasted terrain. God of battles, were they too late? It looked as though a heavy Imperial Marine assault unit had just touched down on the rebel flank and was closing in for the kill. Dev could see only about a dozen rebel machines on their feet… no, fewer than that. And with the forces that closely involved, it would be damned hard to kill Imperials without hitting rebels.

  Tokimkaze’s path past the battlefield, her speed, altitude, and the reach of each of her weapons, were sensed rather than seen, a shifting interplay of mathematical calculations.

  He could sense, too, the lightspeed flickerings of the AI’s thought processes somewhere just behind his own reasoning. In a way, the direct cephlinkage with the computer had made that computer a part of Dev’s own brain. He did not have to explain or calculate. He merely conveyed impressions… We need to hit here… here… here… but don’t get too close there…

  … and the ship’s Artificial Intelligence calculated the best way to give Dev what he needed.

  Seven minutes.

  “We should tell them we’re coming.” Torolf suggested over the link. They could all see at least part of what Dev saw, picking up the feed from him, though they didn’t have the godlike sense of having the ship’s AI as a kind of extra hindbrain.

  “Who?” Bev asked. “Our guys?”

  “The Heggers and the Impies. Maybe take some of the heat off our people.”

  “And maybe get shot out of the sky,” Tewari said.

  “I doubt that they could touch us,” Dev said. His own words sounded remote, like someone else speaking. “Anyway, their radar has probably been tracking us for an hour how.” A thought occurred to him. “Anyway, we should announce the first official unit of the new Confederation Navy!”

  There was a chorus of assents to that.

  “You know,” Koenig added, “we really need another name for this bucket. Somehow, the Confederation destroyer Tokitukaze doesn’t quite make it.”

  “What’s Tokitukaze in Inglic?” Torolf asked. “Ah… Fair Wind. Not bad, I suppose.…”

  But Dev was remembering his first night with the rebels, after his rescue from Omigato.

  He knew what the ship’s name was, and he knew he didn’t have to poll the other rebels on his decision.

  Instead, he told Simone to open HEMILCOM’s general com frequency. Transmitted in the open, every military unit on Eridu, rebel and government, ought to pick it up.

  “Attention! This is the Confederation destroyer Eagle,” he announced. “Imperial Naval forces in the Chi Draconis system have been eliminated.”

  Well, a slight exaggeration. The Shusui was still on a hyperbolic free-fall to nowhere, but the Gekko had apparently made some repairs and was making for Babylon. It didn’t look like she was going to be much of a threat, however. Dev suspected her weapons and targeting systems were down.

  “In the interest of ending further bloodshed,” he continued. “we suggest that all government forces cease immediately all offensive operations and open negotiations with the local Confederation forces.…”

  The refrain of Lorita’s song repeated in his head, over and over.

  For the Eagle has landed. Tell your children when.

  Time won’t drive us down to dust again.

  Not strictly true. Eagle couldn’t land, even if she had full thruster and maneuvering control, which she most certainly did not. He studied the rapidly evolving patterns of color unfolding on his mental viewscreen. There was the space elevator, ahead and slightly to the left. They were lower than expected. It looked like perigee would be about ninety kilometers.

  “We’re getting a reply from HEMILCOM, Captain,” Simone reported. “In the clear. They’re telling us to surrender. And I’m getting a simultaneous transmission to Hegemony units on the ground. Orders to continue the attack. Also in the clear.”

  “They want us to hear,” Nicholson pointed out. “They’re calling our bluff.”

  “They probably figure we couldn’t unlock their nukes,” Dev said. “Or else that we wouldn’t dare trigger them that close to the space elevator. We’ll show them what some computer-assisted conventional firepower can do.”

  Two minutes. The Eagle shuddered through thickening air, her outer hull glowing cherry red at her nose and the leading edges of her hull. Jagged bits of wreckage and hull metal peeled back from the hole in her side, then exploded into fiery bolides.

  At the last moment, the ionization layer surrounding the hurtling vessel nearly ruined everything, blocking radio transmissions both from the ground and from HEMILCOM, and for a critical few seconds Dev and the computer both lost sight of their targets as they lost their data feeds.

  Then the Eagle hit a denser layer of atmosphere and skipped high, like a flat stone skimming calm water. The ionization dissipated, the data feed was back.

  And the last seconds ticked away to the moment when Babel would be above the horizon and in range. Five… four… three…

  The Imperial warstriders had engulfed the rebel right flank. Darcy had gone down, his Fastrider riddled by plasma bolts a
nd laser fire and the slam-slam-slam of explosive cannon rounds. Katya didn’t know if he’d ejected or not. The marine striders were behind her now, between her and the dome, and she had no time for anything but raw survival.

  Hagan and Chung had their Scoutstriders next to her LaG-42; the three were virtually back to back now as the enemy closed in from three sides. The main rebel line was leaking like a sieve as Hegemony striders crested the hill at last, and black-armored infantry gunned down the fleeing rebel troopers.

  The sky turned white.

  For a long moment, Katya didn’t know what was happening. She knew only that her optical sensors had been burned out and her external microphones had been knocked out and something like an earthquake had just slammed the bottoms of her Ghostrider’s feet and knocked the machine over on its side. As her optics came back on-line, she was groggily aware of the canted horizon savagely backlit by what looked like a rapidly moving, pulsing pillar of fire. Eridu’s odd mushroom-shaped trees were being plucked into the air and shredded, and with them went bits and pieces of combat machines and troop carriers and whole warstriders. The ground was continuing to hammer at her LaG-42 as though the planet itself had just woken up and was pounding at her like an irate tenant pounding for quiet on the ceiling above him.

  And then the light, that glorious, dazzling, blinding light, was gone. Dust continued to swirl through the air, mingled with bits and shreds of vegetation. An instant later, it was starting to rain.

  Katya was still dazed. Strange, she thought. A moment ago there wasn’t a cloud in the sky.

  Self could feel the vibrations from the interface between Void and Rock.

  For some time now, it had been sensing disturbances, magnetic and seismic… there, but it was difficult to be certain that this was the human’s signal.

  But then, suddenly, there was no doubt. Pressure waves rippled through rock, one following the next in a pounding, hammering succession not unlike the shocks that had accompanied the cessation of the far-Self. Tendrils reaching through kilometers of rock twitched, anticipating Rock becoming Void in an agony of radiation flux… but then the vibrations were past. Dimly, dimly, Self sensed Something Else, a center of intense magnetic, radio, and thermal emissions sweeping through the Great Void quite close to the interface.

  That was the signal. Widely spaced elements of Self triangulated on the precise epicenter of the shock waves. It was there, not far from the tempting savor of pure elements that extended from the interface and far into the Void.

  Self gathered its strength, surged up toward the Void.…

  The government forces broke and ran.

  The actual target point for that unprecedented bombardment from space had not been on the front lines, for that would have destroyed rebel and government forces alike. Instead, the barrage had swept across the Hegemony’s rear-area muster point, a group of clearings not far from the monorail line where they’d grouped their personnel carriers and repair vehicles and stockpiled the ammunition and repair parts they would need to fight a major battle. Several Imperial ascraft had been grounded there as well, those that were not in the skies over the battlefield, as well as the marine field commander’s headquarters.

  Most of the Hegemony reserves were destroyed outright. Every ascraft in the sky was clawed down by the greater-than-hurricane winds that briefly swept across that hillside with a force great enough to set the sky-el itself vibrating in a slow, ultralow-frequency ring that would not totally damp out for days.

  As for the warstriders fighting atop the hill, many were banged up a bit, and one Hegemony pilot was killed when his Swiftstrider was impaled by a tree trunk, but they suffered relatively little direct damage. The marine and Hegemony striders had had enough, however. Once they’d learned their rear area logistical support had been wiped out, they elected to break off the fight and pull back to the fortress at Nimrod.

  The politicians could wrangle all they wanted to. It was no part of a striderjack’s duty to slug it out one-on-one with an enemy destroyer.

  Many of them never made it. They were withdrawing in good order down the Babel-Nimrod road when a volcanic fountain of rock and debris spewed into the sky fifty meters in front of them. Seconds later, before they could react, before they could fully appreciate what was happening, the Xenophobe appeared.

  Part of the problem was that the vast, tar-black, liquid-rippling thing in front of them was totally unlike any Xenophobe any of them had ever seen. Instead of the usual snake-form combat machine, this appeared to be a vast and gelatinous mass, a writhing, seething, living sea that engulfed the lead warstrider whole clear to its hips. The pilot was screaming mindlessly by the time the cloud of nano disassemblers wafting off that deadly sea’s surface began to eat through to his slot.

  Some of the Imperial striders managed to make it into the jungle to either side of the road, blundering ahead through nomad trees and anemone plants until they were helplessly trapped by the dense press of vegetation. Most of the Hegemony striders, unwilling to face the horror ahead and less than pleased with the desertion of their Imperial comrades, reversed course and returned to Babel. Many eventually joined the rebellion.

  Self contented itself with absorbing a number of the metal-and-ceramic constructs, some trapped unmoving beside the path, others cut off by the quicksilver flow of its pseudopods.

  Sadly, it found no other Self to communicate with. It found several humans and approached them, caressing them in an attempt to open a dialogue, but none possessed the biological communicator that the first human had worn as part of its outer covering. None wanted to speak with Self.

  It hesitated for a long time then, sensing the overwhelming presence of pure metals, of humming magnetic fields, of the towering, massive glory that seemed to rise from Rock clear into the Great Void.

  Then it bubbled to itself and backed away, flowing back down the tunnel it had warped through the rock. There was too much about humans that it did not understand, much about this interface zone at the ragged edge of the Void that was unpleasant. It would return to the comfort of Rock, there to wait its next human contact.

  It wondered if humans would want to talk with it again, and what they might have to say.

  Chapter 34

  God forbid that we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion.

  —Thomas Jefferson

  C.E. 1787

  When Dev entered the Government House hall, the party was already in full swing. He remembered the last party he’d attended—the Kodama affair on Earth—and grinned. This one was a lot more… comfortable, though it was louder, rougher, and considerably more boisterous.

  “Dev!” Koenig yelled from halfway across the quite large room. “Dev Cameron!” Someone started applauding, and then they all were doing it, clapping and whistling and cheering. Dev grinned and saluted, and then the noise and music were going again. Dev, wearing the newly designed brown-and-tan dress uniform of the Confederation Army, accepted a drink from a grinning Vince Creighton and started to make his way through the throng toward the far side of the room.

  He spotted Lokans Vic Hagan, Harald Nicholson, and Erica Jacobsen in one corner, laughing uproariously with a cluster of Eriduan colonists and Newamie Mech Cav striderjacks. In the middle of the room an impromptu square dance had started, with Lorita Fischer—as always, her red headband in evidence—providing the Scottish-sounding skirls of a fiddle tune on her mentar. Simone and Torolf were two of the dancers, thumping noisily about the square more or less in time to the music.

  Most of the people present were in uniform of one sort or another, though the rest wore anything from the plain, rugged tunic and trousers of the typical frontier colonist to a few ambassadorial types in gold-trimmed capes and shoulder cloaks. Those last were Hegemony observers, and Dev wondered what they were going to report when they returned next week to the Hegemony Council. The Confederation was doing its best to present the revolution on Eridu as a fait accompli, something that the Hegemony and the Imperi
um would be better off simply accepting, rather than continuing with what would certainly be a long and destructive war. The Confederation had plenty of friends on Terra. Maybe… maybe there would be no more fighting.

  Somehow, Dev doubted that things would work out that conveniently. A lot of good men and women had died on both sides of the lines in the short, sharp fight over Eridu, and many more would die before Hegemony recognized Confederation. The Empire would view the loss of one of the Shichiju worlds with alarm, a loss of kao, a first crack in the wall of an old and crumbling house. Other worlds were certain to join with Eridu in secession: New America and Liberty, already rattling their chains and proclaiming their freedom; Loki, its ravaged economy just recovering from a two-year struggle with the Xenophobes; Rainbow, from whence had come recent reports of sharp fighting between American colonists and Imperial marines. Dai Nihon would fight to preserve the old order, to keep the old house from falling down, even though the war, inevitably, would tear the Hegemony apart.

  Well, maybe it was time for the old to give way to something new. Watching the animated people in this room, remembering the painted, pampered mannequins at Pulau Kodama, Dev wondered if there wasn’t something cyclical in the need to give the cosmos a good shaking every so often, especially when civilization gave up the hungry, questing edge of the frontier for the comfortable familiarity of decadence.