Rebellion (27 page)

Dev’s machine was Duarte’s command Ghostrider. His maintenance crew had transferred the name
Koman-do
from his old strider to the new when he’d returned to the Armory from orbit with his promotion and new orders. Officially, he was still listed as an advisor, but for all practical purposes he
was no longer a
koman,
but a full-fledged member of the 4th Terran Rangers.

He was trying not to think of it as a kind of demotion, as getting broken from Imperial staff officer back to
Hegemony striderjack. His position on the staff had always been predicated on his expertise on Xenos, and when that expertise no longer applied, it was only natural that his superiors slot him in someplace where he could be useful.

But the reassignment rankled nonetheless, his brevet promotion to
rai-i
not withstanding.

He’d feared morale problems with his takeover of the unit, but so far there’d been no complaints and few problems—none, at any rate, that hadn’t been handled by a quiet talk in the privacy of his office. There’d been some of the usual soldiers’ grumblings, of course, but Dev’s prestige—the striderjack who’d once talked face-to-face with the Xenos and lived to tell about it—had proved to be both ID and authorization. It had become a special mark of distinction for the men and women of A Company: “Yeah, but our skipper knows the creep-crawlies personal, on a first-name basis!” More than that, Dev knew each of his men personally, and they liked and respected him for it.

For several days, he’d immersed himself in A Company’s records, familiarizing himself with the myriad details of supply, maintenance, and logistics vital to the functioning of any military unit. It had been a colossal and thankless task, and he’d used his cephlink to bypass sleep for four nights running. The effects were starting to catch up with him now. He was going to have to let himself get some sleep soon.

“Hey,
Tai-i,”
a voice called to him over the tac channel. It was
Sho-i
Gunnar Kleinst, a kid from Eridu’s Euphrates Valley who’d enlisted with the Rangers shortly after they’d arrived on-planet. The kid barely spoke any Inglic at all, but over the AI-coordinated tactical com link, his German was translated as smoothly as if Dev had taken a Deutsch RAM implant. “Think we can stop off for some R&R? My mother lives in a little farm outpost just over that hill.”

“Not this time, Gunnar,” Dev replied.

“Aw, let the kid go see his momma,
Tai-i,”
another voice suggested. It was
Chu-i
Giscard Barre, from the state of Gascony in Terra’s European Federation. “We’ll cover for him.”

The Rangers, Dev had found, were unusually close, surprisingly so given that they’d been drawn from a dozen Terran nations, including both Europe and the American states. Old national rivalries died hard sometimes. Half of the states of the European Federation hated the other half, and animosities were still close to the surface in some parts of the continent despite the
Teikokuno Heiwa,
but those nationalistic divisions vanished, for the most part, within a tight-knit group of men and women stationed light-years from their homes.

That closeness was rarely extended to the locals, even though the colonists were also mostly from north-central Europe and from eastern North America. The Terran-born troops didn’t like the mincies—hated them after Duarte’s death, in fact, because Duarte had been popular with his men—but after a suitable probationary period they tended to think of recruits like Kleinst as fellow jackers, not as mincies or locals. It was an odd twist of human psychology, Dev thought, that European-born troops could hate European-descended locals, yet accept one of those locals as a fellow comrade-in-arms to the point that they even thought of members of his family as “people” instead of mincies.

“Sorry, guys,” Dev said, replying to Barre’s suggestion. “We have our orders and we’re on a short leash. No time… and somehow I don’t think HEMILCOM would approve of consorting with the enemy.”

He meant it lightly, as a joke, but it fell flat. “My mother is not an enemy,” Kleinst said.

“Aw, gok HEMILCOM,” an unidentified voice added. Dev thought it might be the big Dutch
chu-i,
DeVreis.

“Yeah, the dissies are all back in the city.” another voice said. “Out here, it’s just folks.”

“Quiet, people,” Dev ordered. “Open circuit.”

He hoped HEMILCOM hadn’t been listening in. He doubted that the Hegemony brass would understand, and Imperials like Omigato would be downright peeved at any hint of fraternization between the troops and the locals. So far as his troops were concerned,
the enemy
was any outsider, whether he was a local, an Imperial, or some fat Hegemony
gensui
in his comfortable office up in Eridu synchorbit.

They were moving down a gentle hill into the district known as the Euphrates Valley. The region was nothing like its Terran namesake. The land was lush and fertile, the forest open and airy, the sky showing through the canopy alive with sparkling light. This close to the south pole, Marduk barely rose or set at all. The land was in perpetual twilight, with the sun always either just above the horizon, reddened by the atmosphere, or just below, with aurorae filling the sky with eerie, pearl-luminous shafts and curtains and sprays of light. The trees around them were the characteristic, multitiered mushroom shapes of Eridu’s trees, some reaching fifty meters in height, but the ground was more open, less choked with saprophytes and walkers than in the equatorial regions. Eriduan flora was not as active at the poles as it was near the equator; the low angle of the sun eliminated most of the harsh ultraviolet, making both temperatures and UV levels pleasantly temperate.

The Euphrates was one of the largest rivers on Eridu, sinuously winding across some three thousand kilometers from one side of the south pole to the other, before emptying into the Clarke Sea. The names of cities, towns, and outposts in and around the river delta region echoed the placenames of Terra’s ancient Near East: Ur and Lagash; Assyria and Sidon; Karnak, Tanis, and Valley-of-Kings.

Named for a city that had once existed in the Nile Delta rather than the fertile crescent, Tanis was a domed community—a village, really—of about eighteen hundred inhabitants. Most settlements in the Euphrates Valley were agricultural combines of one sort or another; denigrass, a local plant that provided an easily dyed and woven fabric as soft and as pliable as synsilk, was the foundation of the valley’s thriving textile industry. Tanis, however, was a mining community. A largely automated thoridite mine had been tunneled into the rocky slopes of the Sinai Heights. Most of the people in Tanis worked in the processing plant just outside of the village dome.

Tanis lay just ahead, on A Company’s line of march. Their exact mission still hadn’t been transmitted to them yet, but the who-was had it that there were Xenophobes in the area. DSAs—the deep seismic anomalies that meant Xenophobe tunnelers were working below ground—had been tracked in the area for almost three months now. Ever since those two nuke depth charges had been used near Karnak, there’d been intense speculation about where the next ones might go down. This area was a good bet, and some were speculating that Tanis would soon be evacuated so the Impie marines could trot out their nukes.

In any case, he’d been ordered to deploy his company into the Euphrates Valley east of Tanis, then stand by for further orders. Their warloads included anti-nano countermeasures and rockets with high-explosive warheads, so it didn’t look like they would be gassing mincies this time around. Everyone in the regiment was convinced that another Xeno breakout was imminent and that they’d been positioned to make the first intercept.

Dev had heard about the recent Xeno attack near Babel, of course, first as a furious round of who-was spreading through the regiment’s maintenance personnel and enlisted troops, then as a terse announcement from HEMILCOM. He’d felt a sharp, mounting frustration at the news; if there’d just been a comel available… but HEMILCOM still insisted that the long-awaited comels from Earth had not yet arrived.

At least, that was the
official
story. The who-was going around the Rangers’ barracks carried a different tale, and Dev wasn’t sure yet how to take it. Rumor had it that bandit raiders had intercepted a government monorail earlier that week somewhere in the Equatorial Mountains, killed several Imperial Marines, and made off with a classified piece of DalRiss bioengineering.

The only DalRiss artifact Dev could think of that might be on Eridu was a comel,
his
comel. If the story was true—and Dev had the typical soldier’s faith in any juicy who-was—then he’d been lied to.

Just as mystifying was the question of what bandits wanted with a comel. From all of the reports he’d heard so far, the various bandit groups operating in some of Eridu’s wilderness regions were a bloody, undisciplined lot, and it was unlikely that they’d know what to do with the thing once they had it. Possibly they intended to hold it for ransom.

Well, none of that was Dev’s concern now. He was back to fighting Xenos, and if his superiors saw fit to keep secret the comel’s arrival, that was their affair. Still, the situation had left Dev depressed and disillusioned. The Hegemony’s military bureaucracy was so vast it made him feel lost, vulnerable, and helpless all at once. It was hard to tell what to think, what to believe. Sometimes it was all he could do to just keep pushing ahead, following orders and taking each day as it came.

The strider company reached the edge of the woods, where the trees and brush thinned away to nothing and an orange-yellow sward dropped away beneath them. A kilometer ahead, a cluster of domes nestled about the base of a low, rock-rugged hill. The broad gleam of the Euphrates shone in the sunlight beyond that. The twelve warstriders moved slowly into the open, straggling into an uneven line along the crest of the hill.

Tanis. The nearest, largest dome was the town proper. The farther domes housed mineheads, separators, and processing plants. The silver thread of a monorail wove in from the northwest; the refined thoridite was loaded aboard freight monorails for shipment to Babel and loading aboard sky-el shuttles and transport to orbit.

Time to check in.

“HEMILCOM, HEMILCOM, this is Ranger Blue One. We have reached our objective. Awaiting orders.”

There was a long pause. “Ranger Blue One, Hegemony Military Command copies. Wait one.”

They stood there, the striders casting long, long shadows in the light of the horizon-skimming sun. Dev could sense movement visible through the transplas surface of the largest dome. He engaged his telescopic vision, zooming in for a closer look and enhancing the image.

He could see color… and a throbbing, rippling movement. At first, he thought he might be looking at some sort of panic, and he felt a slick, hot flutter of fear. Xenophobes were able to sense large concentrations of metal from far beneath the surface, especially the ultrapure concentrations of cities and other high-tech assets. Had a Xeno surfaced inside Tanis?

“Enhance again,” he told his Ghostrider’s AI. The image shimmered, then steadied. He could see… faces, yes, a sea of angry, chanting faces, clenched fists, signs, and banners. He could almost imagine he heard the mob’s roar. A holoscreen four stories tall projected a vast and angry face above the crowd, silently mouthing passionate phrases.

“God,
Tai-i,”
his number two said. “It looks like another riot.”
Sho-i
Wolef Helmann had replaced Charles Muirden in the Ghostrider’s second slot.

“See if you can pick up an audio channel that’ll let us listen in,” Dev told him. “I want to hear what they’re saying.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Say,
Tai-i?”
That was Martin Koenig’s voice. “You don’t think HEMILCOM’s going to use us for mob-busting again, do you? We’re not rigged for it!”

“Don’t anticipate them, Koenig. Iceworld until we get the word.”

But Koenig was right. They had rockets with HE and AP warheads, heavy machine guns with explosive rounds, and a deadly antipersonnel weapon called CM—canister monofilament—that promised to be effective against Xeno machines as well. They did not have gas or dispersal grenades—or sonic stunners either, for that matter. And this time they did not have infantry support.

Had they been sent here to quell another riot? Or was the appearance of that mob down there pure coincidence?

“I’ve got a broadcast channel, sir,” Helmann said. “I think it’s their speaker system from that big screen.”

“Let me hear.”

“… the foul poison of the Hegemony and its Imperial masters! I say, citizens of Eridu, that we must fight! Yes, fight to reclaim our world, our rights, our lives, our souls from this—”

“Who the hell is that?” Schneider wanted to know.

“Jamis Mattingly,” Kleinst replied. “Local troublemaker.”

“An agitator?” Helmann wanted to know. “Who with, the HCs?”

“They say he has Network connections.”

“Kill it,” Dev said. He didn’t know if that rally was being staged by Green dissies, New Constitutionalists, or old-fashioned anti-Imperial agitators, but he’d heard enough.

“Ranger Blue One, this is HEMILCOM. Stand by for special direct feed. Unit CORAM only.”

If Dev had been in his human body, his eyebrows would have arced up high on his forehead. A special direct feed? That was reserved for extraordinarily secret orders, a transmission directly to the unit commander’s personal RAM—CORAM, in military parlance—that bypassed normal communications systems.

Dev pulled up the appropriate mental code. “Okay, HEMILCOM. This is
Tai-i
Cameron, CO of Company A. Standing by for direct feed.”

“Authenticate.”

Dev transmitted his personal code, in effect confirming that he was who he said he was.

“Roger,” the HEMILCOM voice said a moment later. “Authentication received and confirmed. Here it comes.”

Data flowed through Dev’s cephlink, a short, hard cascade of data already packaged in a private RAM file. “Transmission complete,” the voice of HEMILCOM said. “Execute immediate.”