Rebellion (30 page)

Omigato had taken command of the HEMILCOM communications center at Eridu Synchorbital. The plan, Omigato’s carefully crafted and precisely balanced plan, was in danger of being smashed, and it was all the fault of that cursed
gaijin,
Cameron.

It had mattered little to Omigato whether the town was destroyed or not, since his target was not Tanis but Devis Cameron. The American, Omigato had been certain, would do one of two things. Either he would carry out the orders and attack the town, or he would refuse the order and set himself up for a court-martial. What Omigato had not foreseen was the possibility that Cameron would actually warn the rebel populace of the town, dispatching one of his own men to do so!

Damn the man! Some of the men on Omigato’s staff, including his own analogue, had guessed that Cameron would carry out his orders and attack Tanis. The orders telling him to do so, of course, could be easily accessed and rewritten before the public trial, and the revised version of them—directing him simply to observe the situation and report to HEMILCOM—was already on file with Eridu Synchorbital’s communications AI. Cameron would be tried, convicted, and disgraced for his part in killing hundreds of unarmed civilians.

Omigato himself had expected Cameron to refuse to carry out those orders. True, the man had been diligent and conscientious in the attack on the rioting mob in Winchester, but Omigato had been watching Cameron closely during the interview with Prem. The fool had agonized over a handful of civilian casualties, convincing Omigato that he would never have the stomach to breach a colony dome. Given that some of his men were native Eriduans who would protest such orders, it wasn’t likely, in Omigato’s opinion, that an attack would take place. Cameron appeared to be one of those
popular
commanders who listened to his men instead of demanding instant and unquestioning obedience. Discipline among the Hegemony troops was not what it was in the Imperial armed forces.

But a point-blank refusal to follow a direct order could be worked into a court-martial as well. By the time the record had been rewritten, it would look as though Cameron and his whole mutinous company had been conspiring with the enemies of His Majesty.

Either way, Omigato would be able to report that the
gaijin
hero had disgraced himself—as had his father before him. The practice of allowing non-Japanese to rise to high positions in government and the military would cease, the advisors closest to the Emperor would be discredited, and members of Omigato’s own Kansei Faction, the Men of Completion, would stand at the Emperor’s side, advising him, guiding the Imperial hand through the difficult times that lay ahead.

It would be a first step toward erasing the disgrace still born by
Dai Nihon’s
Emperor. It would be the first step toward direct Imperial control of every world in the Shichiju.

And, almost as an afterthought, it might also open the way to allowing direct Imperial control of Eridu. Obviously, if the local Hegemony troops couldn’t handle the situation properly…

But Cameron had warned the city: worse, the traitor had arranged for a copy of his CORAM-secret orders to be broadcast to every person in Tanis. The rebels there would see to it that every populated dome on Eridu would hear about those orders. It would mean open rebellion.

Why had Cameron done it? Had the man already secretly joined the rebels? Omigato didn’t think that could be the case, not when Cameron surely knew that his father’s rehabilitation depended on his good behavior. He should have either followed orders… or ordered his men back to base, hoping to argue or plead his way out of the inevitable court-martial. Quietly accepting the trial might preserve his career and it would not affect his father’s rehabilitation. Treason would end both.

It didn’t make sense.

Briefly, Omigato allowed himself to consider the possibility that he had made a mistake. Westerners, Americans in particular, did not share the Japanese reverence for their parents, but Omigato had studied Cameron’s case closely; he’d been certain that the young man would do anything to save his father’s name!

What could have been more important in his life than that?

Gaijin.
Omigato shook his head bitterly. Animals! There was no understanding them.

“Sandoval!”

The
shosa
in charge of the HEMILCOM communications center turned in his seat, eyes wide. “Sir!”

“Open a secure channel to Captain Nagai.”

There was still one chance of salvaging the situation. Nagai and his marines were standing by at Luxor, waiting for orders to move in and support the 4th Terran Rangers in their raid on Tanis.

If Omigato played it right, it might yet look as though Cameron and his
gaijin
warstrider unit had run amuck and sacked the town.

Chapter 25

How much longer must we suffer the yoke of Japan and her Hegemony puppets? How much longer must we slave for others, sending the product of our toils to Earth for
Dai Nihon’s
social welfare programs while our own children go hungry?

—from a speech given at a public rally in

the Tanis dome, just before the battle

Jamis Luther Mattingly

C.E.
2542

Nearly two full hours after Tanis had been warned by Gunnar Kleinst’s arrival, the first Imperials began touching down on the orange-yellow sward outside the main dome. The air cover arrived first, a flight of four Taka, or “Falcon,” ground support tilt-jet aircraft. The Falcons were closely followed by a dozen lumbering magflitter APCs, bulbous, black-hulled machines that settled to the ground, their gull-wing access doors already rising.

The attacking warstriders appeared with devastating swiftness, emerging from the black interiors of the APCs with long-legged steps, accompanied by almost three hundred legger troops.

They were late. Though one company had been standing by in case the Hegemony unit assaulting Tanis needed backup, the orders for a full battalion deployment had come as a surprise, and their transports had not yet been prepped or moved out of their maintenance bay hangars.

As it was, by the time their magflitter APCs were landing beside the Tanis dome complex, a sizable number of locals were already outside, protected by stolen military armor or the heavy E-suits used in the mines and armed with weapons taken from the local armory. Five monorail ore cars had been hauled from the processing yards to the open fields north and west of the town, and there tipped onto their sides, forming a chain of crude but effective redoubts.

The two hundred men and women of Rene Duchamp’s Tanis militia had taken cover behind the ore cars and among the crags and rocks of the Sinai Heights. Despite the reports of hidden arms caches in Tanis, the militia had little in the way of modern weapons. Most of the legger troops carried laser pistols or carbines; squad support weapons had been jury-rigged from 200-MW Mogura mining lasers.

Tanis also possessed six warstriders: an RLN-90 Scoutstrider, three constructors with makeshift weapons, and two ancient LaG-3 Devastators. The Devastators were both almost two centuries old and had been purchased stripped, without their original armament. They clanked into flanking positions on the Tanis defensive line now, massing fifty tons each but mounting only machine guns and light lasers. There was one new addition to the defending strider force, an Ares-12 Swiftstrider still wearing the blue-and-white markings of the 4th Terran Rangers.

Facing them were thirty-four Imperial warstriders, three full companies of the 2nd Battalion, 3rd Imperial Marines, better known as the Obake, or “Black Goblin,” Regiment, under the command of
Shosa
Nobosuke Nagai. Half of the marine striders were Tachi and Tanto recon striders similar in speed, armor, and weaponry to Hegemony LaG-17s. Of the rest, ten were Nak-232 Wakizashis and six were Mitsubishi Katanas, while Nagai’s command strider was a lumbering three-slotter Daimyo. They were accompanied by two companies of foot soldiers in full
do
combat armor.

Though Imperial warstriders were of distinctive design, it was not immediately clear that these were, in fact, Imperial machines. Marine warstriders usually went into combat with their nano surfaces set to a gleaming jet black, and unless stealth was specifically required for the mission deployment, each strider often flew its own
sashimono,
a small vertical banner displaying the
mon,
or family badge, of the unit’s commander.

Nagai’s striders deployed outside of Tanis, however, without banners and with their nano surfaces set to reflect their surroundings. This was less a serious effort at camouflage—hiding a five-meter-tall warstrider on an open field in daylight is simply not possible—than it was a simple misdirection. Tanis was a civilian city; few civilians knew the technical differences between the various classes and models of warstriders or would think to record their images as they stormed the city, and those who did would probably not live to download them to anybody else.
If
there were survivors—and Nagai’s orders were explicit that there were to be none—their impressions would be of varicolored combat machines, big, deadly, and wearing shifting, reflective nanoflage patterns in golds and oranges.

That would be enough like the description of typical Hegemony striders to confuse the issue, especially since HEMILCOM already controlled Eridu’s news and communications networks.

The Battle of Tanis began even before the Imperial forces had deployed from their transports. Taka ground support aircraft and Hachi assault ascraft shrieked overhead, circling, threatening, and the Devastators opened fire with machine gun fire, their cumbersome upper torsos pivoting as they tracked the incoming aircraft, sweeping them with stuttering bursts of 12mm Armor-Piercing Explosive-Core rounds. A Hachi ascraft staggered, multiple APEC rounds punching through the relatively light armor on delta wing and stabilizer surfaces, then exploding inside with the force of small antipersonnel grenades. There was a flash and a shower of flaming debris from the ship’s port side as a hydrogen fuel storage tank detonated. Somehow, the pilot killed the fire, brought the Hachi around, and nursed it off toward the north, still trailing smoke.

Seconds later, two surface-to-air missiles hissed skyward from shoulder launch tubes. One was decoyed by a flare, but the other locked onto the heat plume of one of the Falcon tilt-jets and slammed home with a flash and a puff of white smoke. The Taka began losing altitude, managed to level off, then suddenly stalled and plunged into the forest, its impact marked by a rising mushroom of flame and black smoke.

The other aircraft, too lightly armored to tangle with warstriders or heavy weapons, pulled back out of range just as the Imperial forces hit the first redoubt.

The outcome of that first clash was never in doubt.

Tightly coordinated and disciplined, the Imperial warstriders moved and fired as a unit, combining their fire on the biggest rebel machines first. The Devastators were heavily armored; when they’d first been introduced in 2332 they’d been the most powerful combat machines ever seen, fifty-ton monsters equipped with heavy plasma guns and 250-MW lasers that had made them undisputed monarchs of the battlefield for almost sixty years. But their weapons now, mining lasers and machine guns, were all but useless against the advancing ranks of Katanas and Wakizashis.

One LaG-3 struck a Tanto with a lucky burst of explosive shells that sheared off its left weapons pack, but the concentrated laser and plasma gun fire of seven Imperial striders caught it an instant later, searing through its slab composite armor in seconds, gutting the big machine with multiple blasts that splattered huge globbets of molten steel for meters across the ground and spilled internal wiring and circuitry in great, smoking, half-melted tangles. For an instant, steel and ceramic burned with a white-hot blaze fueled by the stricken machine’s O
₂
life support reserves: then its high-explosive ammo stores ignited, and the rippling internal blasts completed the destruction the Imperial fire had begun, ripping arms from body and shattering the squat, massive torso in a cascade of smoking debris.

The second Devastator scored three direct hits on a Katana with its pair of 50-MW popgun lasers, none of which slowed the target. Then a volley of M-490 rockets slammed into its legs and torso, savaging armor, weapons, and hull fittings, filling the air with whining shrapnel. Stricken, the LaG-3 took a hesitant step forward, faltered, then crumpled as its right leg actuator failed. Fifty tons of dead steel-ceramic composite hit the ground with an earthquaking thud, abruptly silencing the shrieks of the militia troops unlucky enough to be sheltering beneath the huge machine.

With machine precision, the advancing Imperial striders shifted their aim. One of the constructors, damaged an hour earlier while dragging ore cars into defensive positions, exploded before it could fire. The other two were cut to pieces by rapier-swift bolts from three directions at once. The RLN-90 Scoutstrider stood its ground, its Cyclan-2000 autocannon hammering away at the advancing Imperials until a Starhawk link-homed missile slammed into its torso and detonated its micronuke warhead.

Kleinst’s Ares-12 scored the only rebel warstrider kill, blasting away at a Tanto with a stuttering volley of 18mm HE rounds that shattered its right leg and left it smoking on its side. Then a proton bolt from a Wakizashi’s charged particle cannon tore through Kleinst’s machine, turning its Y-5ID fusorpak to slag and sending jagged, blue-white lightnings arcing between the Swiftstrider’s ruptured electronic entrails and the ground.

Gunnar Kleinst died screaming as the Ares-12’s short-circuiting AI downloaded 1,200 volts directly through his cephlink’s feeds into his corpus callosum.

The Tanis Militia’s leggers held their ground for perhaps ten seconds more. Antiarmor missiles and mining lasers fired at point-blank range damaged four of the attacking warstriders, killing the pilot of one of the Katanas. Then, as laser and high-explosive rounds began to sweep through their ranks, they broke and ran. Plasma bolts scratched white fire across the sky as the more delicate traceries of laser ionization flicked from target to target, rending them in sprays of blood and steam-blasted tissue. Rene Duchamp died trying to rally his men behind one of the ore cart redoubts, burned in half by an 88-MW pulse; his second-in-command was crushed beneath the foot pad of a Wakizashi as she fought to reload a shoulder-fired missile launcher.