Rebellion (15 page)

“My ancestors came from Kiev and Athens, General. We remember that those first pioneers came in peace for
all
Mankind.”

“I guess you can look at it either way. The triumph of a nation. The triumph of the species. Either way, it should have been the beginning of a whole new era. An explosion of human diversity and culture and social experiment that filled Earth’s Solar System.

“But the next men to set foot on Earth’s moon were Japanese. They created a monopoly on space-based industries and never let go. We’re living with the results of that to this day.”

Katya studied the faces in the circle as they started another song. Most of them were so young… the student body of a school rather than an army. “Who are all these people anyway?” she asked Sinclair. “Refugees? They don’t look like revolutionaries.”

“Oh, they’re refugees, I suppose. Most of them. But they’re also the Confederation army.” He pointed to a boy sitting across from the mentarist. “That guy was a Lifer activist. The Authority arrested him, forced him to download his entire RAM, and tried to rebrief him. It didn’t take and he came here.

“The girl next to him, in the red skinsuit? That’s Natalia. She couldn’t afford anything better than the government’s level one implant, but she had a friend who could get her the nano for a Model 200 and some unlicensed T-sockets. She got the implant, but the ID imprint was faulty. It gave her away the first time she tried to get a job. She managed to get away, though, and her friend brought her here.

“Now the guy in green, with the mustache… he’s dangerous, a deserter. From Creighton’s company, in fact. Name’s Darcy, and he’d be shot if the bastards caught him. Next to him is Simone. You’ve met her. She’s an absolute wonder with computers. Maybe too much so, because she was arrested for hacking the Heg Authority’s tax offices.

“And that,” he said, pointing at the mentarist, “is Lorita Fischer. She’s in trouble because of her music.”

Katya’s eyebrows arched. “Her music?”

Creighton was sitting close enough to hear. He turned, grinning. “Hey, stuff like what she sings is seditious, didn’t you know? Makes Newamies like us proud to be what we are, proud to be independent sons of bitches… instead of following the party line.”

Katya listened to the next song and applauded softly with the others when it was done. But some deep reservations had taken hold of her, and she was having trouble shaking them.

The Rebel army consisted of kids and a ragtag mob of people representing a dozen different factions, political movements, and even criminal elements—a deserter, an illegal hacker, and maybe worse. None of them could be expected to have the same agenda or even the same way of going about the deadly serious business of revolution as their comrades. It was a recipe for chaos at best, for disaster at worst.

She might believe in the revolution now and subscribe to its ideals, but she had a terrible presentiment that the movement was doomed to failure. How long could such a disjointed and fragile alliance last against
Dai Nihon?

In her own mind, she gave them perhaps one chance in ten.

Chapter 11

Weapons are an important factor in war, but not the decisive one; it is man and not materials that count.

—Mao Tse-tung

C.E.
1938

The Confederation army needed three things desperately: equipment of all kinds, professional training, and seasoning. The Thorhammers couldn’t help with the first, and only combat, God help them, would help the last, but Katya could set up a training schedule in an attempt to pass on to the newbies some of what she and the others had learned in years of Warstrider service.

Since Katya had arrived on Eridu, the notion of hijacking a comel and using it to run a Confederation version of Operation Yunagi had nearly faded away, not so much forgotten as moot. Network Intelligence had not even been able to learn if there were comels on Eridu yet, or where they might be stored. The Imperial use of nuclear weapons proved that the Imperials weren’t interested in peaceful communications with the Xenos, and that meant that Katya and the others might never get their chance.

Almost in compensation, then, Katya threw herself into working with the newbies. She’d run military training programs both on New America and on Loki, and she was able to help now with the selection and indoctrination of warstrider recruits. Only those with both T- and C-sockets could jack warstriders, of course, since temporal sockets were needed for data input, while the cervical socket was necessary for direct neural feedback to the cybernetic actuators. Few of the recruits had direct experience with anything more complex than constructors or the various all-terrain striders used in the rugged Outback.

That was enough to get started with, however, for the principles of cybernetic jacking were the same whether the machine was a warstrider, a starship, a four-legged cargo hauler, or a fifty-ton constructor. In fact, many of the handful of warstriders in the rebel inventory were actually converted civilian machines. Those newbies without the proper hardware were slated for the legger infantry, learning how to maneuver in full combat armor and how to operate, clean, and assemble laser weaponry, assault rifles, and stunners. With seemingly endless drill, and with simulators rigged from ViRcom units smuggled into the Babel Underground, the recruits began shaping up.

They’d already chosen a name for themselves: the Eridu Freestriders.

The Freestriders’ few available combat machines were kept at a jungle base, a collection of domes and underground storage facilities called Emden on the maps, located about fifty kilometers southwest of Babel. A fungus prospectors’ trading and outfitting center for the past forty years, it had a permanent population of about fifty settlers, with perhaps half that number of transients at any given time… precisely the sort of place that Omigato would want to shut down. Already a Network member, the
husmeister
of the place had invited the rebels to use Emden for field training, for maintenance and storage of their heavy equipment, and as a staging area for operations in the jungle.

In Katya’s opinion, the Freestriders were a warstrider unit in name only. It possessed one LaG-42 Ghostrider, two RLN-90 Scoutstriders, an Ares-12 Swiftstrider and a LaG-17 Fastrider, all of them compscammed from various Hegemony stores depots on the planet. Simone Dagousset, Katya learned, fully deserved her reputation as a genius when it came to any kind of computer hacking, and there were a handful of others like her in the rebel organization. By hacking false repair, replacement, or breakage write-off orders through various HEMILCOM stores facilities, they’d had those striders shipped to cargo depots at Babel, where rebel jackers had faked authorizing ’face IDs and simply walked them away.

By similar methods, four lumbering construction striders had been appropriated from some city dome or other and fitted out with bolted-on sheets of duralloy and jury-rigged lasers. Ammo, spare parts, and maintenance gear were almost nonexistent, however, and the strider squad bay was an empty equipment shed in the jungle.

Someday—come the revolution, as Sinclair liked to say—Creighton and other part-time rebels in the 3rd Mech Cav would add their own striders to the Confederation inventory, but that couldn’t be allowed to happen until the rebels were strong enough to take on the Hegemony openly. In the meantime, the part-timers’ positions with the government’s forces were too valuable to jeopardize. Until covert insurrection became outright war, the rebels would have to make do with what they had: nine warstriders—four of them totally undeserving of the name—with almost nothing in the way of service or maintenance support if they broke down.

“This,” she told the assembled group of recruits, “is a warstrider. It is bigger than you, faster than you, one hell of a lot stronger than you, and it’s heavily armed enough to take on an army all by itself. Nonetheless, any one of you can take one of these things down solo,
if
you know how to go about it.”

They were gathered in a clearing outside of Emden’s main dome, in front of the hulking, unmoving statue of a LaG-42 Ghostrider. Nanoflage netting, designed to screen them from the prying eyes of HEMILCOM almost directly overhead, cast a pool of welcome shade, but it was still stiflingly hot. They all wore breathing masks and life support packs, of course, but most, men and women both, had stripped down to briefs and boots in the steamy, early morning heat. Part of the training was getting these kids used to living and working outside, whatever the climate, and working with machines too big to demonstrate inside was a good excuse. But as the long morning wore on, they would be forced to move indoors. Eridu’s sun, which the locals called Marduk, was too intense to take unprotected for long.

As she stood in the clearing lecturing her class on the weaknesses of warstriders, her T-shirt already plastered unpleasantly against her skin, it occurred to Katya that a little terraforming on this hothouse might not be such a bad idea. Eridu, baked by a hotter sun in its early history, had less water overall than Earth, with shallow and land-locked seas, but the humidity still hovered around ninety percent in the equatorial zone. The vegetation surrounding them was a riot of red and orange; the molecule that served as chlorophyll on this world, transforming sunlight to energy, was a sulfur compound that stained the vegetation with its characteristic golden hues. It was a strange world, and a hostile one; humans could not walk abroad without respirators and masks. Chi Draconis—Marduk—provided energy enough to create an amazingly active local flora, including species that moved fast enough to be considered hunters in their own right.

But Katya knew that of all the life forms encountered in Eridu’s jungles, the deadliest was certain to be Man.

“We’ve had warstriders now since the twenty-second century,” she lectured. “There’ve been God knows how many designs since they first saw service, but their basic appearance and function haven’t changed much in three hundred fifty years.”

She knew the history of combat machines cold, the way any good craftsman knows his tools. She did not have it loaded into her RAM, however, which was why she had to pass the data on through lectures rather than palm-to-palm ’facing. Besides, Katya was old-fashioned enough to feel that knowledge acquired by more traditional means—through Mark I eyes and ears, especially—was somehow more a part of a person than data downloaded through nano-grown circuitry into personal RAM.

It just might be the difference between artificial and natural memory that saved a trooper’s life someday, especially if he was on foot and facing a twenty-ton, two-legged behemoth.

Tanks—those lumbering, treaded, steel monsters of the twentieth century—had been rendered obsolete early in the twenty-first century by the worldwide proliferation of shoulder-launched AP rounds and smart missiles that could penetrate any armor. It had been another century and a half before materials science had produced lightweight armor that could survive the modern battlefield, leading to the revival of armored combat machines.

The first warstriders had been bipedal construction and freight vehicles that could traverse nearly any terrain. Jury-rigged with armor plate and light laser weaponry, the warstriders of the 1st Dai Nihon Mechanized Cavalry Division had been irresistible at Seoul and Shenyang, during the Manchurio-Japanese War of 2207.

Even after three centuries, though, warstriders were still controversial. Their critics liked to observe that, like the tanks of an earlier era, they were slow and cumbersome compared to aircraft or airspace vehicles; their advocates insisted that basic infantry combat still required ground forces capable of crossing a battlefield, taking the high ground, and holding it, tactical doctrine unchanged since the armies of Sumer and Egypt. And warstriders were infinitely more survivable on the modern battlefield than armored infantry, as well as being more mobile in varied terrain, better armed, and more terrifying to any nonstrider adversary. During the past three centuries they’d done far more than survive the modern battlefield. They had transformed it.

Yet throughout those centuries, warstriders had only rarely faced one another in combat.

That was one aspect of the Rebellion that had been troubling Katya since before her arrival on Eridu. Save for the simulated reality of training exercises, striderjacks rarely had to think about strider-to-strider tactics. Not many planetary militias could afford even one warstrider regiment, though most had a few old-model clunkers for show. More modern designs were restricted to Hegemony units, while Imperial forces were equipped with the very best—the fastest, smartest, and deadliest war machines in human space. In theory, at least, the distribution meant that planetary militias could never challenge Hegemony forces militarily, while Hegemony units would not be able to win against
Dai Nihon
Imperials. Long ago, the threat of striders fighting striders had become as improbable as…

… as improbable as the collapse of the Hegemony. That, she realized with a start, was a large part of what had been troubling her these past few weeks. If the gathering anti-Imperial movement triggered war, it would be a
civil
war, rending the Shichiju and setting former Hegemony strider units against loyalist and Imperial forces together. The thought terrified her, but it took her a moment to recognize why.

It wasn’t the fact of armored combat alone, certainly. Katya had faced warstriders of a sort in battle before; Xeno Betas were human combat machines captured and nanotechnically reworked by the Xenophobes into parodies of their former selves, shattered, half-melted hulks known with biting black humor as “Xenozombies.” But in a civil war things would be terribly, gut-twistingly different. Colonel Schneider might find himself up against his own daughter on the battlefield.

She might find herself jacking a rebel strider in combat against an identical machine jacked by Dev.

The thought, when she let herself examine it, carried with it an almost paralyzing depression. Could she fight Dev, if she had to, in the dirty, thunderous, close-ranged exchange of an armored clash? She honestly didn’t know. Hell, could she face
any
warstrider in combat, knowing that the pilot might be an old friend, a fellow New American maybe, someone who’d trained with her or maybe once jacked a Ghostrider in her platoon?