Rebellion (32 page)

Omigato’s holographic image floated centimeters off the lab floor amid gleaming, white-surfaced sterility. Cameron, still in his striderjack’s bodysuit, lay strapped to the tilt-top table, his head encased in a cephlink helmet. Tubes and cables snaked from the ceiling, power and data feeds for the helmet, medical life support tubes and medical sensor array cables for the suit. Several medical technicians and a DHS interrogator named Haas stood about the wired, motionless body.

“How does the rebriefing proceed?” To Omigato’s eye, it looked as though the subject was dead. He could detect no movement in the chest.

“Slowly, my Lord,” the interrogator replied. “The subject has a comparatively strong grasp of reality.”

“How much longer? We will have to make an announcement soon.”

“Two more sessions should do it, my Lord.” Haas said. “Three at the most. If we proceed too quickly, attempt to batter down his defenses with too much force, he could withdraw, become permanently catatonic. We would have to start from scratch then, with a brainclear and complete reprogramming.” Haas shook his head. “The results would not be optimal.”

“You have another twenty hours.” Omigato broke the connection and he floated once again in the zero-G privacy of his quarters.

Twenty hours. The local authorities should be able to keep things under control that much longer, at least. There’d been the inevitable wave of alarm in the wake of the Tanis Massacre. The governor’s office had been besieged with calls, a storm of questions, pleas, threats, and demands for clarification, for news, for some kind of official announcement. There were reports of militias in eighteen towns and cities mustering or on alert, though whether that was to maintain the peace in their own regions or to attack Hegemony forces was still unclear.

That announcement, of course, already composed and ready for transmission, said that the
gaijin koman
assigned to a Hegemony strider unit had gone berserk, ordering his unit to attack Tanis, but that he and those of his men who’d followed him were all in custody. The download from
Tai-i
Devis Cameron’s personal RAM, bearing his own access codes and IDs, would prove that he had given the orders, that he and a few of his men had slaughtered the population of a helpless town.

The Tanis Massacre had occurred nearly forty hours earlier, and there were unfortunate, disturbing indications that things had not gone entirely to plan in one respect at least. The Tanis population, apparently, had had warning enough that many had escaped, despite the marine net thrown about the area to catch fleeing refugees. Jamis Mattingly, one of the most important rebel leaders, had turned up alive in Sidon, a city some thirty kilometers downriver from Tanis. According to observers at the scene, Mattingly and others were passing around direct memories of the attack, memories showing Imperial warstriders and troops slaughtering helpless civilians.

It would have been better—a smoother, cleaner operation—if there’d been no survivors at all from Tanis, but Omigato was already adapting to the situation. Once Cameron’s memories of the incident were publicly displayed, it would be one set of claims against another, the radicals against the government, the nuts against those who knew that such things
couldn’t
happen here. Opinion on Eridu would be polarized, and the division might even lead to fighting between rebel groups and the government. There would be many, a majority perhaps, who felt that an Imperial attack on Tanis was unthinkable, that such talk was obviously greenie or lifer propaganda.

All of which would provide the necessary excuse for direct Imperial intervention.

And no matter what happened on Eridu, the
real
battle would already be won simply because the Empire controlled the ships—and hence, the communication—between star systems. The news that reached Earth and the Imperial Palace would be that Devis Cameron, the
gaijin
trusted with communicating with the Xenophobes, had gone mad… possibly from the strain of his contact with the aliens on the Alyan expedition, possibly because the Xenos themselves had somehow twisted or controlled his mind.

That alone would be the victory Omigato sought. The pro-
gaijin
elements of His Majesty’s government and personal staff would be discredited once and for all. The Emperor—dare he hope such a thing?—the Emperor himself might decide to take
personal
responsibility for what had happened. Next in line in the Imperial succession was a protégé of
Gensui
Munimori, like Omigato, a Man of Completion.

As for Eridu, Omigato decided that in the long run it didn’t much matter whether the locals knew about the Imperial involvement at Tanis or not. One way or the other, the excuse he needed to turn the full weight of the Hegemony and Imperial armed forces against the planet’s rebellious populace was already there. He need only wait for Earth and His Majesty to recognize the situation and grant him the authority to deal with it.

And deal with it he would.

Dev awoke once again on the cot inside his narrow cell. Such dark, disturbing dreams.…

Not
dreams. Or rather… dreams, but not his. Nightmares created by computer, or channeled through his cephlink from someone else.

Shakily, he sat up, swinging his legs off the cot and feeling the cold roughness of the floor beneath his bare feet. Now, in the interlude between sessions, he knew what they were trying to do. Like anyone with a RAM implant, Dev possessed two broad types of memory, one biological, the other artificial. The biological memory could be fooled, or it could be blurred or erased by drugs or neural feeds, but the only way to deliberately implant false memories was through hypnosis—notoriously unreliable—or by feeding falsified data through the cephlink.

He’d heard of this sort of thing, though always as a kind of darkly whispered rumor, as tales without proof or substance. “Rebriefing” it was called, the word coined from RAM-edited briefing. Once it had been a military briefing tool allowing updates in published data to be written directly into their RAMs. His intracranial RAM was not as discriminating as his organic brain and would accept anything fed to it. The treatment he was getting here was designed to distort his personal reality, to smash down his barriers between truth and lie.

If they kept at it long enough, he would either end up forgetting what was real and accepting their memories as truth, or he would be driven hopelessly, mindlessly mad.

Already, his memories were disjointed. He remembered being brought to this place, a military dome on the outskirts of Babel, he thought. As soon as they’d pulled him from his strider down in Winchester they’d snapped a horseshoe device around the back of his head, something like a commpac with plugs that snapped into all three sockets.

After that, things were fuzzy and remote. They called the devilish thing a
Kanrinin,
a controller, and it was just that, operating through his cephlink to cut out his will and leave him pliable and content, willing to do anything his captors told him to do, unable to speak or act or even think on his own. He could remember only fragments of what came next—of boarding a monorail in Winchester and of being switched off, of waking again sometime later and being led here, to this cell.

Then the interrogation had begun.

That, too, was fragmentary—fortunately. He only recalled bits and pieces of his “softening up,” as the interrogator had so cheerfully called it. He didn’t know whether that was deliberate on the part of his captors, another means of twisting his sense of time and reality, or evidence of some sort of natural cutout in his mind, a way for his brain to protect itself.

The fragments he retained, though, were still painfully fresh and raw. He remembered being strapped naked to a kind of open framework that had allowed them access to every part of his body. He remembered the razor gleam of scalpels turning in the light, the terrifying
pop-hiss
as a blowtorch was lit, his fascination with the flame’s glow as it descended toward unprotected flesh. He remembered screaming and screaming and screaming until his throat had gone raw, leaving him unable to voice more than a rasping croak. He kept trying to pass out, willing himself into oblivion, but the trickle of energy feeding through his sockets and into his brain would not let him be anything but hideously, shockingly awake.

But eventually, they’d let him faint, to awaken once more back in his cell, shaking and sweat-soaked, the memory of pain very nearly as sharp as the pain itself. With an unexpectedly strong reluctance, terrified of what he might see, he’d looked down at himself, minutely checking feet, fingers, hands, genitals. He’d brought a trembling but blessedly intact hand to his face, touching ears, nose, tongue, and lips, checking, cataloging…

Everything’s still there.
The trembling stopped, but he still felt kitten-weak.
It was all a dream.

But it seemed so real!

It
had
been real. Had those images been manufactured, in the same way that an AI could manipulate artificial memories in a ViRdrama? Or had they been the genuine memories of some poor soul tortured to provide his interrogators with a handy instant replay, a tool for breaking the minds of other prisoners without breaking their bodies?

During one session, he’d actually found himself hovering above that hellish rack, watching as the interrogators carved away at his writhing body, and he’d been certain that he’d gone completely mad at last. Again, he’d awakened later, still, impossibly, whole and intact, but with a dimming grasp of who he was and what he’d been doing…
before.

There’d been three initial “softening” sessions, he thought… or maybe four. After that, the images had turned to memories of his assault on Tanis.

He remembered, and the shaking began again. He thought he was going to be sick. Had those memories been manufactured? Or were they real? Some of the control discretes and data overlays he’d seen were unfamiliar, and he suspected from the feel of the thing that the warstrider was an Imperial model, a Tanto, possibly, or a Tachi. He’d never jacked an Imperial strider, so those disturbingly real memories had to be from a Japanese unit.

Or had they been memories downloaded from a Ghostrider? It was so hard to remember. They’d been interspersed with questions and harsh interjections from his tormentors.

“You are a traitor, Cameron. Just like your father.”

“My father was a hero!”

“Your father turned a Starhawk missile on the Lung Chi space elevator during the evacuation. He was responsible for the deaths of half a million Manchurian civilians.”

“The Xenophobes were coming up the sky-el. There were millions of people already at synchorbit. They all would have died if he hadn’t acted—”

“There was no danger to them or to anyone else. He destroyed the elevator, allowing the Xenophobes to slaughter the people still on the surface. Just like you slaughtered those poor people in Tanis.”

“No!”

He no longer knew what to believe. He did know that the bastards were winning,
winning,
and that, somehow, was the most wrenching torture of all.

They hadn’t told him what they wanted of him, hadn’t even asked any questions save for those designed to keep him off balance, to make him question his own actions, even his own thoughts.

“Why did you do it?”

“But I didn’t! It’s a lie!”

“You are lying. We know you did it. This is you killing those people. Why are you lying to us?”

He checked his internal RAM. It had been twenty-six hours since they’d begun interrogating him. He knew that they would keep at him and at him until he broke, until he told them what they wanted him to tell them, or said what they wanted him to say. He’d already decided to make them work for it, though. He would not cooperate with them of his own free will.

The Hegemony had reinforced its Eridu garrison. The soldiers who guarded him in this RoPro-walled fortress were Chiron Centurians, a crack unit raised and trained on Alpha Centauri. Dev thought they must have arrived in the last few days, because he’d heard nothing of their arrival while he’d been at Winchester.

The Hegemony must be nervous about the Eriduan response to Tanis. Dev didn’t much blame them, and he could understand why they wanted to pin the blame on him. He wondered if enough people had survived the Tanis Massacre that the truth would get out.

He didn’t want to be thought of as the murderer of eighteen hundred people.…

Dev felt a tremor in the floor, a grinding vibration somewhere far beneath his feet. Wearily, he closed his eyes. It was possible that
this
was a created dream, a virtual reality being pumped into his brain to further distort the boundaries of what was real and what was not. He might only think he was sitting here in his bare-walled cell, when in fact he was…

The trembling in his body began again and he wanted to scream:
Stop it stop it stop it!
Eyes closed, he took a deep breath, then opened them again. Nothing in the room appeared to have changed. His cell was three meters high, four long, two wide, with rough-textured RoPro walls and a wire grating over the single small fluoro light source in the ceiling. There were no other fixtures save a drain in the floor and an iris door in one narrow wall. His cot was a simple affair of tubing and wire, with a bare mattress that stank of ammonia and other stale, less definable odors.

Concentrating, he realized he could hear sounds… someone screaming, he thought. And the thud of running footsteps.

What was real, and what a lie? The thumping sound was louder now, and he realized that by the fluorostrip’s light he could see tiny, individual dust motes dancing off the far wall. He blinked, then rubbed his eyes. An earthquake?

The building lurched, and Dev found himself lying on his back on the hard floor. The wall opposite his bunk split from floor to ceiling, opening in a ragged crack that spilled dirt and loose gravel into his cell. He felt the tug of a violent wind lashing at his bodysuit and his hair and he knew that the dome must have been breached because he could hear the pale shriek of escaping air. Reflexively, he held his breath, then let it go, knowing that it was useless.