Authors: William H. Keith
Dev, she’d learned, was almost certainly at Winchester, the planetary capital, some eighty-five hundred kilometers south of Babel.
They were met at the entrance to the Babel dome by a big, rangy, fair-haired man in a military jacket who introduced himself as Lieutenant Vince Creighton. On his left shoulder was a patch bearing a design in white and light blue, a horse’s head and lightning bolt above the numeral three. Katya recognized the device at once. It was the insignia of the 3rd New American Mechanized Cavalry, one of the Hegemony units stationed on Eridu, but Sinclair embraced the man like a long-lost comrade. “Not to fear,” he told the others. “Vince is on our side even if he hasn’t quit his job yet, right?”
“Any time now,” the soldier said, grinning. He wore the collar pin of a strider vet. “Just tell me where to park my strider.”
“Equipment is still something of a problem in the Network,” Sinclair explained to the others. “It’s not easy finding safe facilities large enough to store heavy stuff like warstriders, or to repair and maintain them.”
“We’ve got a new lead on that, General,” Creighton said. Talking animatedly of rebel logistical problems, he led the way to a skimmer.
The rebels’ secret base at Babel—
under
Babel, rather—was a complete surprise.
There were two main city domes resting side by side: Towerdown, surrounding the base of the sky-el and including both the elevator machinery and the shuttle access and debarkation concourses; and Babel itself, a kilometer-wide dome directly adjoining the first. A third city lay below these first two, under ten meters of rock.
Space elevators are not towers built up from the surface of a world. They are bridges hanging down, suspended from synchronous orbit and positioned above the equator so that they never move from the same spot. For engineering reasons, however, they are anchored in place, usually by pylons driven deep into a convenient mountain.
The first colony on Eridu had actually been built underground, as part of the sky-el anchor during its construction. The workers had used nanominers to excavate tunnels radiating out from the elevator base, sealed and pressurized them, and used them as living quarters until the RoPro molds for the first city domes were in place. Later the tunnels were used as storage space for equipment used in the construction of the secondary domes scattered about Babel, and as reservoirs for cool air for the enclosed city’s climate control. Though most were still used for storage and all served as cool air reservoirs, the Network had appropriated some of these tunnels, creating a literal underground for the rebels.
Access to the lower levels was through any of dozens of elevators leading to the city’s sublevels from either dome; Katya and the others were escorted through the accessway into Babel, then into an apparently empty warehouse, Number 1103, one of dozens in the main dome’s warehouse district. Creighton led them down a ramp hidden beneath a meticulously faked shipping crate that slid back into place to conceal the entrance. Other secret routes, he explained, led elsewhere in the city, even winding down through solid rock to the docks of Gulfport at the base of Babel’s plateau.
The tunnels were cramped but dry and well ventilated, lined with RoPro sheeting, plastic storage containers, vacuformed triphylene sheets, and durite, the ultradense rockform created by nanomining. A number of interconnecting chambers had been eaten from the solid rock and made as livable as the crowded circumstances permitted. She saw dozens of people as they passed in those corridors, many of them women and children.
Creighton was walking just ahead of Katya, so tall he had to stoop each time they came to a frame opening at a tunnel intersection. “Three of us are New Americans too,” she ventured.
“Always good to see a fellow Newamie,” Creighton replied. His casual use of the southern New American slang for an inhabitant of 26 Draconis V startled and pleased her. It had been a long time since she’d heard it used.
“So where’re you from,
Chu-i?”
“Please,” he said, wincing. “We don’t use Impie ranks down here.”
Imperial forces, naturally, used Nihongo ranks, while local militias used their equivalents in the local language. Hegemony forces officially used Nihongo rank, but more often and informally used the Inglic form,
lieutenant,
for instance, instead of
chu-i.
Evidently, the rebel forces were shedding every vestige of the Imperial structure.
“Sorry,” she said.
“Hey, no static. Anyway, I’m from Faraday,” he said, naming a large town on New America’s largest south-hemisphere continent. “Been ages, though.”
“Are you all Newamies in the 3rd Mech Cav?” she asked.
Creighton tossed a smile back over his shoulder as they walked. “Hardly. I guess it’s about half and half now, the old hands from back home and the new kids from here.”
It was standard Hegemony practice to station Guard units on some other world of the Shichiju than the world where they were raised. It was difficult for nationalistic or revolutionary fervor to take root in a military unit stationed among strangers in a foreign country. Homeland and family were the two major rallying cries of any war,
especially
a revolution, and it was always better for the state if its military personnel didn’t form too close an attachment to the people they were protecting.
That, at least, was the theory, but it didn’t take into account the fact that the Guard units continued to recruit at their new posts. They had to, to replace the old hands who retired or transferred or died, and the newbies taking their place were mostly kids drawn from the world where the unit was stationed. Men like Devis Cameron—an Earther who’d traveled all the way to Loki to enlist in the Guard—were the exception rather than the rule.
It gave Katya an eerie, almost superstitious feeling, realizing how a unit could melt away like that. There were damned few Thorhammers like her left who’d been recruited on New America. So many people she’d known from her homeworld were dead now. Raul Guiterrez, Mitch Dawson, Chris Kingfield; they’d all been fellow Newamies, and all had died fighting Xenos on Loki. She missed them: sometimes, when she hooked into a strider’s circuit, she could still feel them, as though the linkages they’d shared with her in combat lingered still, electronic ghosts adrift somewhere within her RAM implants.
She still had nightmares about Dawson and Kingfield, sometimes, and RAM dumps and therapy didn’t seem to help. They’d died while linked with her aboard her warstrider.
“So what happened?” she asked, her voice sharper than she’d intended. The bad memories had upset her. “Did your whole unit desert? Or just you?”
“Oh, I haven’t deserted, ma’am. Not yet, anyway. Some have, but I’m still puttin’ in my watches at a base south of here called Nimrod.” He grinned at her. “I’m just a rebel in my spare time, you might say.”
“Doing what?”
“Oh, weapons training. Strider maintenance. We help people get away, mostly. Like those folks we passed back there. The government’s been cracking down pretty heavily on violators lately… the people who don’t like what the Hegemony’s doing and are dumb enough to say so.”
“Dissidents,” Hagan said.
“Free people,” Sinclair corrected him, “who simply want to stay that way.”
“I’m still having some trouble pulling all of this together, General Sinclair,” Katya said. They came to a door in the passageway, and Creighton stopped, ushering them through. “I’d heard there was a rebel underground, of course, but I’ve never heard of anything like
this!
What do you do down here, anyway? Build bombs?”
They entered a large room, well lit and with a conference table that made the place look more like a planning center in a HEMILCOM headquarters than something in an underground, illegal city.
Sinclair smiled. “For obvious reasons we don’t advertise our presence. However, we run what we are pleased to call our ‘liberty-el.’ A few centuries ago, the term would have been ‘underground railway.’ ”
“Railway?” Rudi asked. “Is that like a monorail?”
“A monorail with two maglev floater tracks instead of one,” Hagan explained. “Old technology.”
“We try to help get people out from under the authorities’ heels,” Sinclair went on. “We let them hide in places like this, or we smuggle them to places where they’re not likely to attract official notice. Some we even move off-planet. Most we resettle in Outback towns where the officials don’t look or don’t care.”
Even that, Katya thought, would be difficult on a world of enclosed bubble-cities. Someone who got in trouble with the local authorities couldn’t simply leave. There would be ID checks at each airlock door, passes for travel aboard monorails or hydrofoils, bodyscans for weapons, internal passports.…
“We have our own printing presses down here,” Creighton said. “And facilities for generating new cephlink IDs and records.”
“How’d you get into all of this, Lieutenant?” Hagan asked Creighton. “If you don’t mind me asking.”
Creighton looked away. “A year ago I married a local girl,” he said. “She was a Lifer. Didn’t care for the Hegemony idea of wiping out the local flora and fauna in favor of ours.” He shrugged. “Me, I didn’t care much one way or the other, but she got arrested in a demonstration in Karnak. They let her go after a couple of weeks, but, well, the rebriefings were pretty rough for her. She… wasn’t the same after that.”
Katya had heard stories about DHS interrogation techniques… and about “rebriefings.” There were ways of using a person’s own RAM and link implants against them.…
“She was terrified of getting picked up again,” Creighton went on. “Some buddies of mine in my unit told me about the liberty-el, and that’s how I got mixed up in it. They helped her dump the garbage the DHS fed her, got her a new cephlink ID, and got her away to… well, to a small town, a plantation, really, a few kilometers up the coast. The Hegemony Authority doesn’t have more’n three people in the whole dome up there, and the Impies never bother with little places off in the Outback.”
“And now you’re here helping other people… escape.”
He looked at her, his eyes hard. “Something like that.”
Sinclair was sitting at the conference table, an odd, blank look on his face. Katya had seen analogues look like that, when they paused in the middle of a conversation to refer back to their human control. It was, she realized, his commpac. He must be in communication with someone else, or with a computer net AI. The color had drained from his face, and for a moment she thought he might fall.
“General? Are you okay?”
He held up a warning finger and continued to stare into empty space, listening intently. The others around the table waited, the silence unbearable.
Then something inside Sinclair seemed to let go and he sagged a bit. He closed his eyes. “Oh my God.”
“What’s wrong, General?” Lee Chung asked.
His eyes opened, and he looked first at Chung, then at the others. “It’s the Imperials,” he said. “They’ve just used what they like to refer to as ‘the nuclear option.’ ”
Chapter 10
Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government’s purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.
—Louis D. Brandeis
U.S. Supreme Court Justice
C.E.
1928
“Who is he?” Katya asked. The lights in the conference room had dimmed, and holographic ghosts shimmered and glowed above the center of the table. At the center was a corpulent, swarthy man in expensive-looking garments, addressing a city crowd from the depths of a public holoscreen.
“Jamis Mattingly,” Sinclair replied. “Fusion power plant executive. He also happens to be the Network leader on Eridu.”
Several other people had joined the group in the conference room. A thin, redheaded girl named Simone Dagousset had been introduced as one of the rebels’ sharpest AI system hackers. Another was an Eriduan
oberstleutnant,
a lieutenant colonel with the Babel militia named Alin Schneider. Silver-haired, spare-framed, surgically precise in his speech and manner, Schneider was the coordinator of all Network cells in Babel.
“He and his followers had their headquarters in Winchester until the riot last week,” Schneider added. “We have had reports that the dissident organization in Winchester was completely destroyed when they sent in the Hegemony warstriders.”
“Affirmative on that,” Creighton said. “Since then. Mattingly and his top people have been hiding out in Tanis. That’s a mining community in the Euphrates Valley, about a hundred klicks northwest of Winchester.”
“Mattingly himself sent this report,” Sinclair said. The images they were watching were being downloaded from Sinclair’s RAM through his commpac to the room’s projection system. The scene shifted from Mattingly’s speechmaking to a line of black Imperial warstriders stilting across a plain foot-deep in yellow vegetation. Katya could read the Imperial designations on their hulls.
“We’ve been staying out of the public eye for the past week,” Mattingly’s voice said from a hidden speaker. “But things have started moving damned fast down here, and we’re going to have to act. This morning, Impie Marine striders planted two nuke penetrators not ten klicks from Karnak. They claim they’ve picked up sign of Xenophobe movement underground, and that they were delivering a preemptive strike. Listen to this.”
The scene shifted again, this time to a Japanese man wearing the red sash of an Imperial
daihyo.
“The Emperor recognizes your discontent and your concerns for your own well-being,” the man was saying. His words were in the artificial and slightly stilted Inglic of a translator program, and didn’t match the movements of his lips. “It is my solemn promise to you, the people of Eridu, that your questions, your concerns, yes, your demands for greater autonomy in your own affairs be addressed at the earliest possible time.