Warstrider: Jackers (Warstrider Series, Book Three)

by Ian Douglas

  What Katya couldn't understand, though, was why she hadn't been able to overcome the beast a long time ago. On Alya B-V she'd forced herself to descend a pitch-black well plunging far beneath the surface of a dead and alien city, confronting the nightmare that was never far beneath the surface of her mind. On Eridu she'd experienced far worse; swallowed by a Xenophobe traveler, she'd been carried to a cavern so far underground she'd been convinced that she would never see the world's sun again. Surely, if anything could get her over her irrational fears, those experiences should have done it.

  But they hadn't, and she was beginning to think the beast would always be with her, would be as inseparably a part of her as the interface circuitry woven into the palm of her left hand. When Vic had suggested it, the mere thought of squeezing into the close, dark coffin of a linkslot, of riding there unlinked, unable to see out, able only to feel the warstrider's rocking gait and hear the wheeze and whine of its drivers, had filled her with a dread colder and more personally threatening than any mere fear of death in battle.

  She tried to tell herself that it was more than her own weakness that had made her order Vic to leave her behind. There'd been no time after Mission Link had materialized out of the smoke to stow both Francine and herself safely away in separate slots.

  But a good five minutes had passed between the time Vic appeared and the attack next to the warehouse. Face it, she told herself, hoping for amusement in the thought and finding bitterness instead. You're norking goked-up in the head.

  Outside, the sounds of heavy shelling and rocket fire rose to a crescendo. She could feel the hard, diaplas floor vibrating beneath her feet and buttocks with the concussions, and the loudest shocks were preceded by a flicker through the window, like summer's lightning. Someone was doing some heavy-duty bombardment, and fairly close by from the sound of it. Was she hearing the Imperial warstriders? Or were the Impies potshotting the Confederation lines from orbit? She supposed it didn't matter. One way or the other, she was going to have her work cut out for her sneaking back through the lines tonight.

  She checked her cephlink's time readout; it was well past forty-two hours, late enough that she could probably make her move pretty soon now. Gripping Francine's rifle, she stood up, then reached for her helmet and gloves, which were lying on the floor beside her.

  A sound from the next room, beyond the dark and open archway leading to the restaurant area, made her start. The rifle came up, her finger on the trigger. No time to hide . . . no place to seek cover. . . . "Who's there?"

  What had she heard? It had sounded like the scuff of a boot on the floor, but she couldn't be sure. Heart pounding, she edged toward the doorway.

  A gasp—she was sure it had been a gasp, sure it had been a human sound—came from the darkness beyond the archway, and then she heard the clatter of someone stumbling over one of the pieces of wrecked and overturned furniture. The sound actually emboldened her a bit; no Imperial Marine, no adept of Kokorodo would have made so much noise trying to watch her from hiding—and he damn sure wouldn't have tripped over a table while trying to run away. Rifle at the ready, Katya leaped to the wall next to the open archway, braced herself with a quick breath, then rolled around into the next room.

  Enough light spilled in from the room at her back for her to see dim shapes among the shadows. She didn't have enhanced eyes, but her cephlink included software that processed visual input somewhat more efficiently than her natural wetware. As her eyes adjusted to the dark, her linkware took over, sharpening contrasts and enriching her natural night vision to bring some definition to the shapes. The dining area of The Newamie's Down had been fairly luxurious for what she thought of as a lower-class food-and booze-joint. Those were holo screens curved along the far walls that must once have projected views of the city or other, less realistic illusions, though they were dead and empty now. Eating booths lined the walls of the circular room, while tumbled-over chairs and tables were scattered about the center. She'd already searched the place carefully, but there were several entrances. Slowly, she scanned the wreckage, looking for movement, for anything out of place. . . .

  There! Golden eyes, large and luminous in the gloom, blinked back at her from behind a table . . . then, with a flash of movement, something man-sized bounded toward the left, toward the door leading to the mealprep areas. The building's automatic doors were out, along with everything else requiring grid electricity, but these were partly open, wide enough at least for the . . . whatever it was to scrabble through.

  Katya stood still for a long moment, rifle still raised. What had she just seen? Not a human, certainly. Not with those eyes, though they could have been artificial implants. It had certainly not been an animal. Though New America boasted its own native ecology, evolution—at least on land—had not progressed nearly as far here as it had on Earth. Land-dwelling animal life tended to be small, airy, and airborne, like morninglories, or sluggish, like treewalkers, and nothing on this world had evolved anything like eyes. Plenty of Earth species had been imported, of course, but mostly as pets, since bioengineering allowed the creation of food animals that neither moved nor sensed the world around them in any save the most vague and imbecilic ways.

  Those eyes had blinked back at her with intelligence and with purpose. She was pretty sure she'd just seen a genie.

  But what kind?

  "Hello!" she called, still facing the door to the mealprep area. "Come out! I won't hurt you!" There was no reply, save something that might have been a soft stirring beyond the half-closed door. "Please! I'm a friend!"

  "That remains to be seen, don't it?" a voice, male, but high-pitched, almost a child's, answered from the dark. "You came with the stilters."

  Stilters. Warstriders?

  "My name is Katya. I'm from right here on New America. Who are you?"

  "You're Newamie?"

  Katya jumped. That voice, female this time, had come from just behind her.

  She whirled, staring. The speaker was a woman, a delicate, extraordinarily lovely woman with fine-boned features and large dark eyes. Her hair was mingled gold and silver and hung to her waist; she wore sandals and a wisp of translucent, holographic smoke that did almost nothing to conceal her anatomy.

  She also held a Colt-Mitsubishi 4mm FMP-60, a very real and nonholographic fléchette autopistol, centered squarely between Katya's breasts.

  Carefully, Katya lowered the muzzle of her rifle until it was no longer pointed at the woman. "I, I'm Newamie, yes," she said. She jerked her head toward a wall, indicating the rumble of battle audible beyond. "I'm with the Confederation military forces out there."

  "Confed, Impie," the male voice said, emerging from the wall behind her. "None of that means much, do it?"

  "I'd say it does," she replied. "The Impies are invading our world. I was trying to stop them."

  "All by yourself, girl? Heh! Must be more t'you than meets the eye."

  Slowly, she turned to face the man. He was small, shorter than she was, with long, slender arms, short legs, and a hairless head that gave him a childlike look despite the crow's-feet and worry lines. His eyes were large and golden, almost catlike, though the irises were round rather than slit. He wore an orange worksuit with the emblem of Dow-Mitsubishi Nanochemical on the sleeve, and he, too, held a pistol in his hand, a Japanese Type 36 with suppressor hood and integral laser sight-tracker beneath the barrel.

  "I'm Tharby," he said. He gestured with the pistol. "I haven't quite got the hang of this thing, but I'm pretty sure all I need to do is put the red light where I want it and pull the trigger. Why don't you give Sonya your gun?"

  The woman stepped closer, hand out. Briefly, the thought flitted through Katya's mind that Sonya had just made a serious tactical mistake; she was too close to Katya and had moved partway between Tharby and her captive, a rank newbie's blunder. A sudden thrust-and-spin, and Katya would have the woman pinned from behind, using her as a shield as she cut Tharby in half with a burst from her PCR.

&nbs
p; No. These were genies and they were New Americans. Better to learn about them, about what they wanted, than to kill them out of hand. Clicking on the safety, she handed her rifle to the woman, then stood there, staring at the man, her hands raised.

  "Aw, gok it," a third voice rumbled. "Kill 'er an' let's gokin' get outta here."

  The ruby-glowing tip of the tracker flashed brilliant in Katya's eyes as the pistol's aim shifted slightly, and she imagined the blood red target spot wavering unfelt against the skin of her forehead.

  "I'm with ya, mannie," Tharby said, and Katya watched those golden eyes harden.

  Chapter 12

  Where then lies the difference, if a thinking, knowing, feeling creature was created by nature, by man, or by God? Surely it cannot be the creator that sets the creature's true worth.

  —Intellectus

  Juan Delacruz

  C.E. 2215

  "Don't shoot!" Katya cried. "Please! I'm on your side!"

  "Our side?" Tharby grimaced . . . or had that been a smile? Katya was finding it difficult to read his facial expressions. There were subtle differences in the musculature of his face from that of full humans. "Yer with the army, right? Armies an' killin'. Yer all the gokin' same, an' we don't have no use fer any of you. Right, mannies?"

  That last had been addressed to the others in the room. Katya could see them with her enhanced vision, man and manlike shapes emerging from hiding behind toppled furniture and from various doors. Some, like the woman with the FMP-60, looked completely human but had the exquisite, elfin loveliness of ningyo, of genegineered sexual toygirls. The rest were males, low-level workers, she thought, from the nearby nanofactories and spaceport warehouse complex. Most were Atechies, bald and spindly armed but still fairly close to human, like Tharby. A few, though, had somotypes considerably altered from that expressed by the original human DNA; there was one blunt-faced, hairless, naked giant, muscled for heavy labor and lacking any sign of external genitalia, and several were crossmuted B-techies, with body fur like spun silver and fingers and brains tailored to trace and repair damaged electronic circuits.

  Mannies. At first, she'd thought it was someone's name. Now she remembered that speech-capable genies referred to themselves as mannies when they were with each other. The word, she understood, had come from gene-manipulated.

  "You don't want to kill me," she said, trying hard to keep her voice level, calm, and matter-of-fact. "I'm not your enemy. And I might be able to help you."

  "Eh?" Tharby's golden eyes narrowed. "How?"

  Genies were bred with very specific limits to their intelligence—there was no sense, after all, in bestowing genius on something that would spend its entire life tracing circuits or loading specialized cargo into spacecraft holds. The brightest were likely to be the female ningyos, since some of their clients liked sex partners that could carry on a decent conversation, but even they wouldn't be able to follow complex or convoluted arguments.

  Best to keep it simple and to the point.

  "The Impies are attacking Port Jefferson," she told them. "They're attacking everyone here. Me. You. Everyone who lives here. We have to work together, to join forces against the Impies, if we're to save ourselves."

  She watched the group digesting that, trying to assess how well she was getting through. Some few carried firearms or clubs. Most were unarmed, their facial expressions, what she could read of them, tight and grim. Several began discussing the problem among themselves as the others listened in. Katya was beginning to identify the leaders of the group: Tharby and several workers who might have been his brothers; Sonya and several of the other toygirls. How could she reach them? Convince them?

  One large laborer shook his bald head. "Ah! No talk. Let's do 'er an' odie." Crowding forward, he reached out and brought a powerful hand down on Katya's shoulder, the grip tightening painfully.

  Dropping her arm and turning, Katya seized the offending hand, snapping it back until the wrist popped. "Ow!" the owner yelled. "Watch 'er!" Then her heel came down on his instep, hard, then snapped up against a knee. No matter how it might be designed, apparently, knees were weak points in any biped. The worker bellowed, and dropped to the floor, all further interest in grappling with Katya gone as he clutched his leg. The rest milled about, uncertain and confused.

  "We're not enemies!" she shouted, facing the ring of weapons and hard faces. "We're on the same side!"

  "You ain't one o' us!" a toygirl snapped back, scornful. "You're a gokin' holder!"

  "Damn it, I'm not!" She pivoted, balanced for a fight, praying that she could talk her way out of this. She would never be able to hold her own against so many, even if they were untrained and clumsy.

  "Okay," Tharby said at last. "We listen, humie. But not long." He gestured toward the dead projection wall. "Stilters're out there, an' they might come back."

  "Dak hurt!" the laborer on the floor said, still rubbing his injured knee.

  "I'll hurt you more if ya try t'do somethin' like that without me sayin' so."

  Yes, Katya decided, Tharby was definitely one of the leaders here. He would be the one she would have to reach.

  "Are you all here . . . by yourselves?" she asked. "I mean, aren't there any full humans about?"

  "Y'mean th' holders?" A warehouse worker grinned, slapping a massive club against his open palm. His voice was thick and raspy, as though his vocal cords weren't fully formed, but the words carried the full force of his sneer. "They's runned, ain't they?"

  "Eh. Jus' her left, then," said another who could have been twin to the first . . . and perhaps he was. Successful genie models were often created sterile, with reproduction handled in vitro through cloning, and the embryos implanted in gene-tailored host mothers. Even those that could engage in sex were more often cloned than not, simply to guarantee the preservation of desired physical traits. The sameness of the faces surrounding her contributed powerfully to their doll-like, almost stylized look, that of mannequins, identical save for details of hair, dress, or rare facial blemish.

  Katya zeroed in on Tharby, on the Dow-Mitsubishi logo on his jumpsuit. "You!" she demanded. "Who did you work for?"

  The genie jerked a thumb over his shoulder, in the direction of the big manufacturing plant outside the spaceport. "Chemical nanoplant, o' course. Jefferson Nanochem, Contract Number 897364." He recited the information in a mechanical staccato, as though it had been drilled into him over the course of years.

  "Right. And they're owned by who?"

  "Uh . . . Dow-Mitsubishi." He sounded less confident now.

  "And where are they?"

  He shook his head. "Don't know."

  "Earth," she answered for him. "Tokyo, on Earth. So the people who hold your contract answer to Tokyo. Right?"

  "I guess so. . . ."

  "Don't let 'er gok yer head, Tharby," another genie said. "Th' guys what holds our contracts is Newamies. Like her!"

  "If they work for an Earth corp," she said evenly, "you can bet they work for Nihon. Tokyo controls just about all of the business in the Hegemony, one way or another. That means they hold Jefferson Nanochem's contracts, just like Jefferson Nanochem holds yours."

  "Aw, full humies ain't under contract," a silver-haired ningyo said. Others added their opinions, many of them more like animal grunts than speech. Many low-range genie models, Katya knew, were designed without vocal cords. For the simplest workers, it was necessary only that they understand orders, not speak themselves.

  How much of all of this, she wondered, were they understanding?

  "They are if they're linked to Nihon for yen and promotions," Katya replied. "Do you know what yen are?"

  "Uh, like work credits," the ningyo said. She caught her lower lip between small, perfect teeth. "Only 'lectronic. Yeah?"

  "Yeah. Your holder can't do a thing unless Nihon pays him. Exactly like your contract. That's why the Confederation is fighting the Hegemony. We want to hold our own contracts!"

  "How . . . how could you help us?"
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  Katya wasn't sure of the answer to that one herself. Genies, after all, were bred not only for low IQs and specialized work, but for docility as well. What kind of warriors would they make?

  Still, these genies had obviously turned some kind of corner. Carrying weapons, threatening a full human, talking about leaving their workplaces for other cities . . . they certainly were not acting like typical genies. Watch yourself, girl, Katya told herself. Just like with humans, these guys are individuals. There's no such thing as "typical."

  "I'm not sure," she admitted after a moment. "I might be able to teach you how to fight, how to defend yourselves. If you help me get back to my own people, we should be able to find work for you. Work that you . . . that you'd enjoy."

  There was a long silence at that. Katya could sense the crowd's uneasiness, could smell it in the hot, close air of the place. The silence went on so long she wondered if she'd said the wrong thing.

  This was a dark and normally well-hidden aspect of New American life that Katya had never examined, had rarely even been aware of. New America's Hegemonic charter specifically outlawed slavery, but genegineered "constructs"—they were never referred to legally as "human" or as "people," of course—did not share the rights of their creators. Katya remembered well the ongoing debate between Rainbow and Liberty over whether or not genetic constructs should be considered the same as full humans and given full-human rights.

  That particular political question had never been resolved. On the one hand, freedom parties insisted that intelligence and self-awareness themselves defined what could be legally called human, even though those terms were subject to some pretty fuzzy interpretation sometimes. How intelligent did a creature have to be to qualify, especially when no one could even agree on a good definition of what intelligence was?