by Ian Douglas
As she stepped onto the Park's moving way, a cloud of bright-winged morninglories exploded from an amberbrush, chirruping raucously as though to welcome her . . . or to laugh at her surprise.
Surprising, too, was how good it felt to be home once more, finally, despite the lingering pain.
She'd been back to New America only one other time in the past eight years, and then briefly. It had been almost four months now since she'd returned to New America this time, though Katya had been working so hard for those months that she'd had little time for sightseeing or looking up family or old acquaintances. That, she thought, was probably just as well.
She'd never expected to return to the world of her birth at all. Katya had never been so happy as the day she'd finally won free of her parents' farm outside of Nowakiyev and set off on her own. Her decision to mortgage eight years of expected future earnings in order to purchase her three-socket implants, her downloaded education at Jefferson, her determination to go into space, each had one by one snipped the ties binding her to her old home outside New America's Ukrainian colony. Her subsequent decision to enter Hegemony military service, followed not long afterward by her wholehearted defection to the rebel cause, had completed the break.
New America was a rich and diverse world, one shared by three separate colonial populations. Largest and most powerful was the North American colony, also and confusingly called New America, with its capital at Jefferson, but the south-hemisphere Cantonese and Ukrainian colonies together accounted for nearly half of the world's population of some five hundred million. The American colony was one of the Frontier's loudest proponents of independence from the Hegemony; the Cantonese were just as strongly loyalist. The Ukrainians, as they often were on political issues, were still stubbornly and loudly divided.
As divided as was Katya's own family. Her father had been from Jefferson originally, but he'd never shared the New American ideals of self-government. The Hegemony had heavily subsidized his nowagreebi farm, after all, and his Ukrainian wife was adamantly opposed to what she called the anarchy of revolution.
Katya didn't like to remember her father's last message to her, four years ago, the one advising her not to send another ViRcom download, because they upset her mother so.
The hell with them both. . . .
Jefferson was both planetary capital and the provisional capital of the entirety of the new Confederation, and its spaceport, on the Dickson Peninsula twenty-five kilometers south of the city, was the world's principal link with the rest of the Shichiju. Jefferson was thriving, far busier now than it had been eight years earlier. Though not so modern as some of the Imperial cities she'd seen on Earth, Pulau Kodama, say, or Tokyo itself, Jefferson had the bustle and energy of a city far larger than its population of almost one million suggested. There were no arcologies here, but gleaming, old-fashioned skyscrapers and office domes rising among sprawling parks choked by the native green-gold vegetation. The faintly out-of-date atmosphere was belied, however, by the thronging crowds flowing along the walkways beneath and between those buildings, and by the magflitters and other skycraft warbling overhead.
The city's people were a cosmopolitan lot. Some wore the traditional kilts of the New American Outback, but most looked as though they'd be at home in any major Hegemony city, people in pastel skinsuits or coveralls or worker's garb, businessmen in formal wear and shoulder cloaks, soldiers in uniform—both the brown of the Confederation and the gray of the Hegemony, interestingly enough—and even a scattering of the more exotic dress of other Frontier worlds. Not all within the crowd were full-human, either. Many of the figures in worker's clothing were genies, thick-shouldered, long-armed dockworkers, many of them, or the small, lithe, silver-furred forms of techies.
Katya noticed a pair of warstriders—a couple of aging RLN-90 Scoutstriders with Confederation insignia on their pauldrons—standing guard in the park's central plaza. Peacekeepers. When news of the Emperor's death had reached New America, it had touched that world's different populations in markedly different ways. There had been mourning; there'd been rioting. Calls to completely sever the Frontier's links with the Empire had alternated with calls for reason, for caution, for reconciliation. Things had been quiet for the past couple of months now, but the Confederation Command Authority continued to keep a few striders on alert status, patrolling the city's public gathering areas, just in case.
With a fine sense of irony, the towering, blue-green Sony Building looming high above Franklin Park had been taken over shortly after its former corporate owners had departed, its offices and central AI shifted from the business of an interstellar corporation to that of running a brand-new government. It was still called the Sony Building, in fact, but the corporate logo that had adorned the peak of the eighty-story building for nearly a century had been taken down. In its place glowing, holographic letters floated before the building's facade: FIRST PEOPLE'S CONFEDERATION CONGRESS.
Delegates from Frontier worlds across the Shichiju had been meeting here for months now, trying to hammer out a new government . . . or even just a common set of goals. For her part, Katya had had little time for politics since her unexpected promotion to colonel and assignment to the new-formed 1st Confederation Rangers. Even when she'd joined General Sinclair's personal staff in addition to her other duties, she'd steered clear of the political debates raging now in the Confederation's capital. Sinclair was the politician, she'd reasoned, and the man to deal with the fragmenting ideologies of fifty different cultures on a dozen separate worlds.
That had been changing, lately. For the past month Katya had been dividing her time almost evenly between the old militia barracks near the capital's spaceport and the Delegates' Hall in Jefferson. Her position on Sinclair's staff gave her freedom to come and go pretty much as she pleased even when Congress was in session. It was a fascinating position to be in, giving her as it did a chance to watch an infant government in the making. At the spaceport, meanwhile, she was her old, apolitical self, busily organizing and training the warstrider unit recently designated as the 1st Confederation Rangers.
Technically, the 1st Rangers were commanded by Colonel Jacob R. Weiss, a New American who'd formerly been CO of the 1st New American Minutemen. Weiss was an excellent administrator and a fair organizer, but—as with most of the Confederation's senior military people—he lacked experience in combat. For that reason, Katya was Weiss's 2IC, his second-in-command, normally a position held by a lieutenant colonel. Sinclair had told her privately that when the Rangers went into combat, Weiss would receive a promotion, and she would take over the unit officially instead of merely in fact.
She was more than happy not to be in official command, for running a regiment was as new for her as jacking a warstrider in combat would have been for Colonel Weiss. The challenge was overwhelming at times. Most of Katya's command experience had been topjacking a company, three or maybe four platoons of eight warstriders each, no more than thirty-two machines and—with the support, admin, and maintenance personnel attached to the company-—a total of perhaps 150 people. The Rangers were a full regiment—three battalions, each of five companies, for a total of 480 warstriders and a total roster carrying twenty-five hundred names.
At least, those were the numbers on the Rangers' TO&E. Glowing in the black recesses of some adminjacker's linked mind they looked damned impressive, but Katya knew just how misleading the figures were. So far, the 1st Confederation Rangers mustered exactly 148 warstriders, half of them obsolescent relics, plus 867 men and women, of whom only 115 had three sockets, with the physical ability to jack a strider in the first place. Of those, seventy-eight had actually jacked a warstrider into combat.
Those seventy-eight, though, had seen plenty of action. Most were veterans of Raeder's Hill, on Eridu. Some were from her old 2nd New American unit, and had experience fighting Xenos on Loki or with the 1st Imperial Expeditionary Force. Good people, all of them, shoulder-companions well disciplined and steady. They would provide the c
ore of this new regiment, this new idea that Sinclair so wanted her to begin.
A purely Confederation army.
"You're aware, aren't you," he'd asked her one morning recently, during a break in the debates on the floor of Congress, "that none of what we're doing here is new?"
She'd just told him how much she admired his drawing organization out of vacuum, order out of the chaos that was the rabble of people, cultures, and causes that made up the Frontier.
"You've told me the original Americans went through something very like this . . . when? Six hundred years ago?"
"Seven hundred sixty-seven years, to be precise. At the very dawning of the First Industrial Revolution. The ancestors of the New Americans managed a revolution of their own, and against odds as great as those we face now. The scale was not so grand, perhaps, but the ideas, the causes, the hopes, they were much the same. One people—actually a collection of diverse and insular cultures, farmers, merchants, seafarers, scholars, frontiersmen, and God knows what else—seeking to express their own ideas of individuality and personal freedom while under the rule of what had once been their motherland. The mother had become tyrant, you see, and wanted to keep a firm hand on them. They'd grown, however. Living on the frontier had changed them, enlarged their spirits. As living on the Frontier has enlarged us. And the mother, like the Empire, could not afford to let them simply turn and go their away."
Sinclair shifted in his seat, rubbing at his graying beard. "One of the biggest challenges those early Americans faced," he continued, "was getting such a diverse group—thirteen separate and quite individual colonies—to work together. Each was jealous of the others . . . as Varuna or Nowakiyev are of New America, say. Many had particular grievances with one another over issues like trade or slavery, very much like Liberty and Rainbow."
"Slavery? Slavery's been outlawed for centuries."
"What about the genies?"
The words had been soft, with no hint of reproach, but Katya's face had burned . . . with embarrassment? Or shame? She'd never thought of the issue in quite that way before. For that matter, she'd rarely thought about genies, though she'd seen them countless times in Jefferson's walkways and parks. On most worlds, and for the most part, they were a tiny minority, kept comfortably out of sight.
"In any case," Sinclair had gone on, "a regiment of Rhode Island militia didn't want to find itself marching into battle with a bunch of Marylanders and New Yorkers, say. And they wanted a good, steady Rhode Islander in command, not some damned Virginian."
The names meant nothing to Katya, though she guessed they were the colonies Sinclair had mentioned. "I thought they were all Americans?"
Sinclair smiled. "That idea hadn't quite taken hold yet, you see. A man was a Rhode Islander, or a Virginian or a Pennsylvanian first, an American second. 'America' was just too big a concept. Sort of like our Shichiju. Can you really picture the scope and sheer damned size of an empire comprised of seventy-eight worlds? When one world alone is such a universe of diverse peoples and cultures and history and wonder as New America, say, or old Mother Earth?"
"I've never really thought about it that way, General."
"So those first American generals had to invent an American army. It took an act of Congress and it damn near took an act of God, but they created what they called the Continental Army and it became their elite, led by the best officers they had, supported in the field by all of the individual state militias."
"And it won the Americans' war for independence?"
Sinclair gave her a wry smile. "Actually, they got the kuso kicked out of them time after time, and what the British regulars didn't do to them, winter and disease and an almost total lack of supplies did. Katya, I tell you it's a damned miracle New America wasn't named New Britain. It was a damned close-run thing."
"Kuso!" It was almost a wail. "What hope have we, then?"
"Ah, but they did win, remember. Eventually. Through perseverance. Through learning from their mistakes . . . and by making fewer mistakes than did their enemy.
"And always remember, Katya, that the past is never repeated exactly. Its patterns might repeat, but never the particulars, never the details. You and your 1st Confederation Rangers, you might be our analogue to that first Continental Army. But with an understanding of our own technology and strengths and abilities that those early Americans never had, we've got a chance, a fairly good chance, to beat the Imperials before they really take notice of us and decide to step on us like bugs. Hell, all we need do is convince them that it's easier and cheaper to let us go without a fight. In the long run, you see, that's how all revolutions succeed." His eyes had gone vacant for a second then, as he consulted some inner data. "Blast. You've let me ramble, girl. We should be getting back to the floor. I have a weakness for history, Katya. You shouldn't have let me run on so!"
But Katya routinely downloaded to her personal RAM all of Sinclair's "ramblings," as he called them. Often she played them back in the quiet of her quarters during off-duty hours, and lately she'd begun editing, organizing, and cataloguing them into a history, of sorts. Sinclair's intense, almost archaic love of the peoples and issues and events of past times helped weave a framework against which Katya could hang the events she saw unfolding around her now.
As she stepped off the slidewalk and bounded up the steps of the Sony Building, she found herself remembering again that particular conversation and wishing that Dev were here so she could download it to his RAM and discuss it with him afterward.
If only Dev could hear some of this! It might well give him the perspective he needed to understand the rightness of the Confederation's cause. They'd often disagreed in the past over what the Confederation was trying to do, over whether or not it was worth the cost.
She suppressed a small, inward shudder that mingled both hope and fear. Dev must be on his way back from the Daikoku shipyards by now. Was he still alive? Never mind the success or failure of his mission, was he still alive?
She found she very much wanted to see him again despite all that had happened to drive them apart, and the power of that wanting caught her by surprise.
Katya palmed the ID reader at the entrance to the Congressional Hall. Tired and feeling thoroughly dirty, she'd just come straight from a twenty-hour session with a new shipment of warstriders. They'd belonged originally to Nowakiyev, fifteen machines donated by that colony's militia nearly a year ago and kept in storage since then on the outskirts of Port Jefferson, the spaceport outside of the planet's capital. They were ancient pieces, some of them; the most modern was a hulking KR-9 Manta manufactured at Earth's Toshiba Orbital in 2531, twelve years ago and already bordering on obsolete.
The oldest? Ah, that would have to be the pair of T-90 Gunwalkers. They'd come off the assembly lines a full century and a half ago, and what a record they had! They'd served in the Osiran uprising, and later in the colonial militia on Shiva. The Shivans had sold them both to Nowakiyev in 2501, when news of the first Xeno incursions on An-Nur II had created war panic and invasion hysteria across the Frontier.
The Ukrainians had contributed those fifteen striders to the then Greater New American Defense Force, a unit long since disbanded. Now, thanks to the political strains between New America Colony and the other two settlements on the world, there were unexpected problems. Spare parts needed to get those machines on-line were not to be had. Katya also needed nanopattern technicals, the complex data bases that described a piece of equipment virtually molecule by molecule, allowing repair and service nano to be programmed to carry out their assigned operations on that particular machine.
Sinclair had more pull than most with the disparate elements of the New American delegation. Perhaps he could help.
She arrived in the Hall, as she usually did these days, in the middle of a firestorm of debate. For the past month or so, discussion had centered on the issue of genies, on whether or not they could be—or should be—accorded the rights of full humans. That fight had waxed hot, with Libe
rty and Rainbow taking opposite poles on the issue and attempting to batter the rest of the delegations, by words if not by force, into choosing one side or the other.
Ten days ago that issue had been tabled. There were signs of growing strains within the fragile Confederation. The Emancipator Party of Liberty had demanded an addition to the Declaration, one proclaiming those supporting genie slavery to be "outlaw states, unworthy to sit with civilized men." In reply, the Rainbow delegation had threatened to walk out if genies were allowed to vote or given representation in Congress. Sinclair and the other moderates had hoped to give both sides some time to cool off and consider their positions . . . and options.
What followed, though, had exploded even hotter, a nova's flare of recriminations and ill-feeling. Why was it, colonies like Nowakiyev and Canton and Deseret wanted to know, that the hotheads of sister colonies like Liberty insisted on complete dissolution of all ties with the mother empire? The Reconciliationists, as they were coming to be known, wanted to effect a repair of relations between the various Frontier worlds and the rest of the Hegemony. Surely, reform could be won through negotiation, while the only result of war would be the absolute and total destruction of everything Man had built on the Frontier.
Palming her ID into a final security station interface, she waited for the door to dissolve. Duane Lassiter's 3-D image dominated the central display in the amphitheater beyond. A delegate from the Frontier world of Eostre, he spoke Inglic; a wholehearted Reconciliationist, he spoke with desperate, articulate passion.
"Do you actually believe," he was saying as Katya entered the Hall, "that a mere handful of systems can survive on their own, with no trade with the Hegemony? Cut off, isolated from the rest of humanity . . . for mark me, such would be the fate of worlds who turned against their brethren.
"Worse, would war with the Hegemony pit New Americans against Cantonese and Ukrainians in a bloody civil war, brother against brother, father against son? The fratricide of civil war, I tell you, has always been the bloodiest, bitterest, and most genocidal war of all. . . ."