Jackers

by William H. Keith

  From the embrace of his slot aboard Eagle, Dev surveyed the assault force’s prize with growing excitement.

  Through the crisscross of girders, Dev could make out long, black ships moored between gantries and docking access tubes on the facility’s third level, eighteen military vessels of various types, ranging in size from cutters and corvettes to three small destroyers. All appeared to be brand-new, their gleaming, durasheath hulls night-hued, unmarred by dust impacts or wear. They hadn’t even been painted yet with unit markings or the insignia of Imperium or Hegemony. More ships were visible in the fitting and drawing yards close by, still resting in their nanovat cradles or newly emerged from their armoring flux and awaiting only the finishing details of drive controls or weapons or AI installations to make them fully operational.

  All that most of those ships needed were crews and full loads of cryo-H in their tanks. Several more—a close inspection would tell them how many—were ready save for weapons. Even unarmed, they would be valuable additions to the Confederation fleet, and something could be done about arming them back at New America.

  As for the rest, Dev studied each with a small pang of regret. They included the monster frame of a half-assembled Kako-class cruiser and two Naka-class light cruisers, as well as twelve smaller vessels; if only they could be made operational!

  Unfortunately, there was no time. Imperial or Hegemony ships could arrive at any moment, and it was critical that Dev both get the captured ships back to New America and preserve the original members of his squadron. All he could do was order the destruction of the unfinished ships.

  After the shipyard was secured. According to the boarding party, most of the base’s complement of Imperial Marines were either on the ground or still in their barracks, a duralloy cylinder attached to the control center by a long access way, already sealed off as though they were expecting a siege. A handful of marines in the station proper resisted; the firefight—the firefights, actually, since the skirmishing was widely scattered and completely uncoordinated—were over in minutes.

  “We’ve got ’em,” Lieutenant Gary Langley reported over the net. “Control center secure!”

  “On my way.” Dev broke contact.

  Minutes later, he made his way through the zero-G tangle of corridors toward the orbital base’s control section. With him were several members of his shipboard staff, including Simone Dagousset, a Confed computer expert with her command team. Bodies floated there, broken and bloody, though mercifully few. More of the Imperials had chosen to surrender than to fight, it seemed.

  A door dissolved open, and he pulled himself hand over hand onto the main control deck, a large, circular room cluttered with electronic consoles, the gray bulk of a dozen full-linkage couches, a projection dome over all set to view surrounding space. Eagle hung there beyond the fragile barrier, a most convincing inducement to surrender.

  Langley met him. He carried an unholstered blast pistol, and there was a blackened, half-melted slash across his armored plastron. “This was the control crew, sir,” he said. “The Nihonjin were linked when we came in. The others weren’t.”

  “Thank you, Lieutenant.”

  “Uh, if you’ll excuse me? Some of my boys are busy with the Impie Marines.”

  “Go ahead, Gary. I’ve got the watch.”

  The prisoners watched him narrowly as he moved closer. They’d segregated themselves into two groups, Nihonjin and gaijin, beneath the guns of the Confederation troops who’d burst in here moments ago. The Japanese—there were five of them, all men—looked sullen and resentful. The gaijin, four men and three women of various skin shades and ancestries, seemed less monolithic in their emotions, which ranged from fear through confused uncertainty to outright hostility. All wore bodysuits of utilitarian gray; moments earlier, they must have been linked through the station’s AI to its defense and communications systems. They clung, like Dev and the others, to handholds in deck or bulkheads to keep from drifting. Giving the others scarcely a glance, Dev centered his attention on the oldest-looking Japanese, assuming that he would be the one in charge. He appeared to be in his fifties, with a long, creased face.

  “Konichiwa, Shikikansan,” Dev said formally. By addressing him as commander—the word meaning position rather than the rank—Dev hoped to put the proceedings on a less-than-hostile footing. “I am Taisa Cameron, of the Confederation Navy.” How strange that sounded in his own ears!

  The Nihonjin officer did not sneer, not quite. “You seem somewhat young for such high rank.” His English, if stiffly precise and formal, was perfect.

  A bulldog-faced Japanese at his side snickered and said something low. Dev caught the word shiro—an epithet meaning, roughly, “white boy.” Kuso! He had no credibility with these people at all. No kao.…

  Heat brushed his cheeks. “Sergeant Fillmore?” He turned to the armored noncom Langley had left in charge of the Confed troops. “Find a place for these people. I want to have a peek at their datanet.”

  “Yes, sir,” she replied. She holstered her handgun and rasped out an order to part of her squad.

  “You will get nothing, kaizoku,” the bulldog snapped. The Nihongo word meant pirate. “You’re too late! The storage banks have been purged.”

  “He’s right, I’m afraid,” another voice said from the second group of prisoners, which was positioned now at Dev’s back. “They were busy killing its memory when your people barged in. My God, Dev… Cameron is it? Is that really you?”

  Dev tugged on the handhold he was clinging to and rotated his body. It couldn’t be—

  “Lloyd?” He had to search for a first name, so much had happened in intervening years. His cephlink helped. “Randi Lloyd?”

  Randi Lloyd had been First Helm on the freighter Mintaka, years ago when Dev had first signed aboard that ship. He’d taken Dev under his wing, a raw newbie with his sockets still slick with sterile shipping fluid, showing him the feeds on his first shipboard slot, junior cargo officer. He’d left not long after, reportedly to join the Hegemonic Guard. Dev had admired him; his own decision to join the Guard had come at least in part from Lloyd.

  “You know this guy?” Sergeant Fillmore asked.

  “I certainly do.” Dev gestured. “Simone? Check out the computer.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Small galaxy, eh?” Lloyd said as Dev drew nearer. “When did you turn pirate, son?”

  Older than Dev by fifteen years, his face was seamed and he was showing some gray at his temples. He’d aged a lot since the day Dev had last seen him. No wonder he’d not picked him out immediately.

  “Who says I did?” Dev replied, smiling, more to hide his own uncertainty than anything else. “I’m fighting for the Confederation now. Maybe you’ve heard of us?”

  He’d not seen Randi Lloyd for years now. He still felt as though he were the junior apprentice, and Lloyd the teacher, and had to suppress the urge to add the word “sir.”

  “Aye, I’ve heard,” Lloyd said. He didn’t return Dev’s smile. “I never figured you to throw in with a bunch of losers like that, though. You know, don’t you, that they’ve got the proverbial snowball’s chance on Moloch?”

  “You will all be utterly destroyed,” the base commander added from the other side of the compartment.

  “Well, I’m not here to debate it with you,” Dev replied. “With either of you. What’s the word, Simone?”

  Dagousset had just pulled her hand clear of a terminal interface. She shook her head, short red hair bouncing with the movement in zero-G. “I don’t think they actually deleted anything,” she said. “More like they locked it away under a password, with a false front to make us think we’ve come up dry.”

  “Really?”

  “I don’t know. Just a feeling, the way things’re organized in there.”

  Simone Dagousset was the sharpest mind with a computer net Dev knew. Sometimes he thought she was more than half computer herself. “Okay, Simone. Thanks.”

  “I can whittle
away at that password if you want.”

  He nodded. “Do it.”

  Lloyd raised his eyebrows. “What is it you’re looking for, Dev?”

  “Actually, all we’re here for is a few of your new ships out there. But we’re always interested in having a peek at the opposition’s computer files. You never know what you might learn about prowords, general orders, fleet movements, that sort of thing.”

  “Fleet movements?” Lloyd said casually. “Like the one we had through here a week ago?”

  “Damare-yo!” the Japanese commander shouted, lunging toward Lloyd. “Shut up!”

  A struggle broke out with the Japanese prisoners. Fillmore kicked off a bulkhead, intercepting the commander with a shoulder block across his knees that sent both of them tumbling out of control. Other Confed troops closed in, blocking off the captives.

  “Uragiri-mono!Kono yogore!” The bulldog-faced man struggled in the grasp of two of Dev’s men, his face flushed with rage. “Traitor! Filthy bastard!”

  “Get them the hell out of here!” Dev shouted above the confusion. The Confeds hustled the Japanese prisoners out of the room, and there was silence once more.

  “I don’t think you scored many points with your boss just then,” Dev said. “You want to tell me what that was all about?”

  Lloyd exchanged glances with the other gaijin. One of the women shook her head. “Randi, I don’t think—”

  “Damn it,” one of the men snarled. “We swore oaths of allegiance!”

  “You think we owe those bastards anything?” Lloyd replied, bitterness in his words.

  “Jamis,” Dev said, signaling one of the remaining Confed troops. “Take these people someplace else. Not with the Imperials. See that they’re made comfortable.”

  “Right, sir.”

  “The rest of you wait outside, please.”

  In a moment, Dev and Lloyd were alone—except for Simone, who had jacked herself into one of the link couches and was now in the room only physically. Mentally, she was deep within the AI program running the base.

  The Hegemony officer looked him up and down. “ ‘Taisa,’ eh?” He chuckled.

  “It’s not something I’m real comfortable with yet, okay?”

  “Oh, I wasn’t criticizing. Every navy has its own ways of doing things.”

  “You wanted to tell me something?”

  “You arrived here from New America, right?”

  Caution stayed Dev’s tongue. “No. What makes you say that?”

  “I was a merchant spacer quite a while, remember.” He nodded toward the dome, to where part of the Vindemiatrix was visible at the base docking port. “I know a Newamie long-haul design when I see her.”

  “We get our ships from all over,” Dev said, a little stiffly.

  “I don’t doubt it. Including, I gather, Hegemony automated shipyards.”

  “When we have to. What’s your point, sir?” The honorific slipped out, unbidden.

  “Tanemura didn’t want me spilling the feed, Dev. We had a major fleet movement through here eight days ago. All Imperials, no Hegemony ships at all. They called it the Cherry Blossom Squadron, and it was under the command of an Admiral Kawashima. A tough old bird, I’ve heard. One dragonship, the Donryu. Thirteen cruisers, five of ’em big sons of bitches, Kako- and Atago-class. Ten destroyers, four of ’em Amatukazes, like your big boy out there. Eight transport marus, big ones.”

  “Good God,” Dev said. “That’s a major invasion force.”

  “On target. They pulled in here to pick up two new-grown destroyers and to take on a full load of slush-H. I was linked into the commnet just before they boosted clear, and I heard Kawashima talking to Tanemura.”

  “Tanemura’s your boss here? The one with the long face?”

  “That’s him. One of ’em, anyway. I heard him wish Kawashima gambatte kudasai at New America.”

  “Good luck,” Dev translated. The news left him numb. An invasion force of that size had passed through the Athenan system over a week ago, headed for New America? And the presence of eight troop transports suggested that when they got there, they planned to stay.

  “You… you have proof of this?”

  The other man shrugged. “It’s all in the datanet. There should be a complete set of IFF codes in there, signal protocols, ViRcom frequencies, everything.”

  “I don’t suppose you have the net’s access password.”

  “Um… try fugaku.”

  Dev considered his old shipmate. The word, a poetic form for Mount Fuji, in Japan, could be a code unleashing some sort of dump order in the AI’s memory. He didn’t think so, though. Lloyd looked sincere… and angry, and Dev could feel an inward bond with the man, a warrior’s yujo. Besides, surely the system’s Japanese masters would have already initiated a dump, if they’d had it set up that way.

  Lloyd must have noticed Dev’s hesitation. “That was the keyword for most of the secure fleet traffic stuff. If there’s a higher security access, I don’t know it. They kicked the lot of us gaijin off-line and took over just as you made your move out there. I imagine they put up security blocks once they figured nothing we could do could stop you.”

  Dev looked hard at the man. “Why?”

  “Eh? Why what?”

  “Why do you want to help? We are enemies, aren’t we?”

  “I… guess we were. But all we’ve heard about you officially is that you exist. Terrorists, guerrillas, that sort of thing.” He shrugged, the motion setting him slowly rotating until he reached out and snagged the edge of a console to steady himself. “I never dreamed you had any kind of military muscle behind you!”

  Dev glanced at the overhead dome, at the warships stationed close by the base. “I don’t know if you could call that muscle. The Empire’s a lot bigger than we are.”

  This was the question Dev had been confronting within himself. What had made Lloyd betray Hegemony and Empire with scarcely a moment’s thought? Not the appearance of a single, battered destroyer and a few made-over transports, surely!

  Lloyd scowled, then looked away. “Dev, things have changed a lot since we were shipmates. I’ve changed a lot.”

  “Hegemony service’ll do that to you.”

  “This was more. I’m C of MGU now.”

  “Huh?”

  “Mind of God Universalist. I converted a year and a half ago.”

  Dev blinked. Not a religious person himself, he’d known plenty of people who were, and he tried to keep, if not an open mind, then an accepting one. But there were far too many sects, cults, and competing beliefs across the Shichiju to ever keep track of them all.

  “Sorry. I don’t know that one.”

  Lloyd smiled. “I’d be glad to download to you, of course. Now’s hardly the time or place. Basically, we believe all Mind is part of God, that God is nothing less than the sum total of all Mind everywhere and everywhen, from the Creation to the end of time. It’s like we’re each of us subroutines in a universal AI. We—”

  “As you say, Commander, this isn’t the place. How’d all that get you in trouble?”

  “I downloaded to my department head.”

  “An Imperial?”

  Lloyd nodded. “An annaisha. Not too smart, huh?”

  “Well, I suppose even one of God’s subroutines can make a mistake.” Annaisha, “guides,” were Imperial officers serving with the Hegemony Guard. Some served openly, as military liaisons, but others, reportedly, were plants, Hegemony officers who reported secretly to an Imperial control on morale and loyalty within their Hegemony unit.

  From what Lloyd had just told him of his beliefs, Dev could understand why he’d been posted out here. The Imperials preferred belief structures that supported the status quo, not wild and unsettling philosophies stressing equality or the divine nature of all intelligent beings. That sort of thing could give gaijin the wrong sorts of ideas.

  “But you still haven’t answered my question,” Dev went on. “Why should you want to help us? What you just did c
ould get you shot, you know. Or psychoreconstructed, at the very least.”

  “And it would be worth it, Dev. To keep them from burying us.”

  “Who, the Universalists?”

  “Good Mind of God!” Randi said. “Yes, us. And the Church of Christ of the Cosmos. And the Disciples of Deseret. The Baptists. The Greens. The Back-to-the-Soilers. Everybody, Dev, who doesn’t think the way they do! That’s what Empire and Hegemony are all about. And that’s what you and your friends are fighting against, isn’t it?”

  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.