Warstrider: Jackers (Warstrider Series, Book Three)

by Ian Douglas

  The personnel at Carlson itself were left alone; Dev had planned to take that facility as well, which was why he'd brought the warstriders aboard Mirach and Vindemiatrix in the first place, but they were no threat where they were, and if they ventured into orbit aboard their own ascraft, the Confederation ships could easily blast them long before they could approach the station.

  With that implied threat hanging literally over their heads, the Imperials and the gaijin mining crews at Carlson had obviously decided to sit it out on the surface, and Dev had given orders that they be ignored. He couldn't afford the trouble—or the casualties—of storming their base, and there was no military reason to do so.

  All Japanese personnel on the orbital facility were taken to Atlas after routine questioning. The gaijin personnel, however, were given a choice—stranding with their Japanese masters, or a slot with the rebels. Randi Lloyd, the Hegemony shosa in charge of Guard personnel at Daikoku's orbital shipyards, and thirty-two other new Confederation recruits had accepted Dev's offer.

  Dev had been disappointed that the number hadn't been higher, but Randi had explained that the rebel cause was still unknown to most people in the Hegemony. The government hardly went out of its way to publish the Confederation's side of things, and for most people within the Hegemony Guard, the rebels were nothing more than a ragged band of discredited malcontents, political agitators, and terrorists . . . if, indeed, they existed at all.

  That belief extended to the Imperials as well. People who assumed they were fighting rabble often got careless, and carelessness led to mistakes.

  Which, of course, they were counting on . . . that, and the AI codes and security protocols lifted from Daikokukichi's computer. Lloyd's help, Lloyd's treason, might well prove to be the difference between success and failure.

  The return journey from Athena to 26 Draconis had seemed to drag on forever, day following day in a slow-crawling procession. Dev had passed that time by spending nearly every waking hour linked in with Eagle's AI; when he wasn't actively participating in jacking the vessel home, he was running simulations, elaborate ViRdramas of what they might find when they dropped out of K-T space on the borders of the 26 Draconis system, given the size and strength of the Imperial force that had called at Daikokukichi.

  Basically, the possibilities as Dev had worked them out boiled down to just two: either the Imperials had been able to move swiftly and decisively enough that they'd been able to seize Jefferson—and with it most of the Confederation government—within a few hours or days of their first landing; or the fighting would still be going on when Eagle arrived. The chances of the Confed forces blocking the Imperium's local space superiority were so slim that Eagle's AI wouldn't even assign them a probability. Imperial forces would land; there was no way to stop that. The only question was whether or not they could crack the Confederation defenses and break all resistance on the planet within one week of those landings.

  Of the two, Eagle's AI gave a slightly higher probability—one of sixty-one percent, in fact—to a longer, more protracted fight. Engineering the invasion of an entire world with a population of half a billion people was a complex problem in both strategy and logistics. Unless the Nihon admiral in charge had been extraordinarily lucky, or the defenders had been extraordinarily clumsy, by D+7 the Imperials would control New America's major cities and spaceports, including, of course, Jefferson itself, but enough of the Confederation armed forces and local militias would have been able to escape intact that they could almost certainly continue the fight, even if they were forced to become little more than guerrilla units scattered about in the New American Outback.

  In fact, the world of New America was especially well suited to guerrilla warfare. Its native, human-compatible ecology would allow the defenders to live off the land; cities, farms, and settlements were not all enclosed within sealed and vulnerable domes, as on Eridu. The rugged, usually mountainous, often heavily forested terrain would shield the defenders both from warstrider patrols and, to a lesser extent, from orbital scans. Though Imperial victory was virtually certain in the long run, New America's defenders could keep the fight going for years, so long as they had the willingness, the heart to do so.

  That—the question of heart—was more than anything else what worried Dev as Eagle swam through the blue glory of the godsea toward far 26 Draconis. He remembered the political divisions within the Confederation Congress before he'd left, and wondered if the rebel government might not simply cave in when confronted by the full, crushing weight of Imperial space and ground forces. It was one thing to proclaim the benefits of full independence when the Emperor's battlefleet was forty-eight light-years distant, quite another to proclaim them when that fleet was in orbit, its assault forces pounding on the doors to the Sony Building itself. All it would take would be a majority vote by the more timorous members of Congress, one agreeing to accept Imperial terms, and Eagle might arrive to find the Confederation government dissolved, its army disbanded, and the promise of Sinclair's Declaration of Reason only a fading memory.

  Dev was surprised to realize just how much he didn't want that to happen. He still felt ambivalent about the Confederation's chances for victory in the long run, but he'd learned something important from Randi Lloyd, from his decision to betray Empire and Hegemony.

  With seventy-eight populated worlds to choose from, with the promise of unnumbered more worlds yet to be discovered and explored beyond the boundaries of the Shichiju, with the technology to create space habitats and orbital colonies entirely independent of the presence of Earthlike worlds, the Cosmos ought to be big enough for everyone, big enough for every group and culture and faction that had its own rules for living and its own goals to reach for.

  Ought to be. But Nihon and Earth's Hegemony together were committed to controlling each offshoot of Humankind's diaspora the way a parent Naga controlled its fragment >>selves<<. To maintain that control they needed to maintain conformity. Oddball sects and factions like the Disciples, the Randites, the Greenies, or the Church of Mind of God Universalists needed to be suppressed, or at least actively discouraged from spreading messages of personal freedom or of individuality or of resistance to governmental authority; Japanese thought, in management and in government, stressed the concept of sodan, or group consultation, whereby a consensus could be reached for which no individual need take full responsibility. Consensus and conformity were the keystones of Imperial rule, individuality its greatest enemy. From the government's point of view, for its very survival, individuality had to be suppressed everywhere within the Hegemony simply to keep the assembly of human worlds and cultures from splintering into countless, squabbling fragments.

  Dev suspected that such had been the case for authoritarian regimes throughout Earth's history; the disintegration of the Soviet Empire during the closing years of the twentieth century, the collapse of the Chinese state a half century later were obvious cases in point. That most such empires had originally been established—like the Hegemony—to keep the peace and protect their citizens tended to be forgotten in the trail of government-sponsored horrors aimed at promoting conformity of thought.

  Sinclair had had much to say about individual liberties, Dev remembered. He'd downloaded Sinclair's Declaration of Reason into his personal RAM, but over the course of the past few months he'd played it back so many times that the words had long since been burned into his organic memory as well. Much of that document, explaining why the Frontier worlds had to sever themselves from Imperium and Hegemony, was devoted to a single theme. No government, it stated, could unite the brawling, clashing, vibrantly discordant variety of human culture without mashing it all into a grim, gray sameness . . . and it shouldn't be allowed to try. Was that a principle worth fighting for, no matter how long the odds?

  Dev now knew that it was. Randi Lloyd's decision to help the Confederation force at Daikokukichi had impressed him with just how very much there was at stake in this struggle. If anything stops the Shichiju fr
om becoming a boring sameness on every world it possesses, Sinclair had told him and Katya once, privately, it's the hodgepodge of wonderfully varied human cultures on every planet we've set foot on. Hell, they're what keep things lively!

  And Dev was convinced now that Sinclair was right. The odds were still damned long. . . .

  Yoroshii. He was in this thing now, and the hell with the long odds. The Confederation had no chance at all if he and all the other jigging chokies caught in the middle of this fight didn't link in and download everything they had to the Cause. Even the Empire would have to admit sooner or later that no government, no matter how sprawling or massive or powerful, could be maintained for long against the active resistance of its citizens. The Shichiju was too large for any one government to control; when enough worlds realized that and demanded independence, something was going to give.

  In the meantime, the New American raiding force had taken a big step to throw some mass behind the Confederation's demands. A pity, Dev thought, that there hadn't been a way to loose the Confederation's brand-new navy against the Imperials at 26 Draconis. That would have shaken Imperial complacency!

  It would also have been suicide. Though Dev had played through hundreds of tactical simulations to check his initial feeling, he'd been certain from the beginning that the new Confederation fleet could not seriously challenge Ohka Squadron. Hell, that dragonship alone might prove too much for one destroyer and twenty-odd frigates, corvettes, patrol boats, and assorted small stuff . . . and it didn't help at all that most of Dev's people were little better than newbie recruits. Most had jacked ships before, but few had been in combat. Too, they'd been stretched damned thin among the captured vessels; some of the officers and crew on the smaller ships would be standing watch-and-watch all the way to their destination.

  If he couldn't challenge the Imperial squadron at New America in battle, then, he would have to find another way to get past them. Before leaving Daikoku, he'd assembled his battle staff and the commanding officers of his force in Eagle's conference lounge for a marathon planning session, discussing alternatives.

  Most had recommended that the raiding force return to New America and challenge the Imperials. Understandable. The majority of them were New Americans; it was their homes and families and friends that Donryu was threatening, and the need to go back and do something, anything, was an almost palpable presence in the compartment.

  In the end, though, Dev had exercised his command authority and overidden the majority's recommendation; there would be no attempt by the raiding force to engage Donryu or her escorts at New America, not when such an attempt would mean almost certain destruction. Instead, he'd left the captured fleet, as well as Mirach, Tarazed, and Vindemiatrix, at Daikoku, all under the command of Jase Curtis, Tarazed's CO.

  He'd given Curtis explicit orders for what they were to do next. Eagle alone would making the passage from Athena to New America, her crew made up entirely of volunteers drawn from the entire squadron. Also aboard were a dozen transport ascraft, some shuttled over from the Tarazed, others picked up new from the Daikoku Yards.

  Randi Lloyd, now a commander in the Confederation navy thanks to a field commission conferred on him by Dev, had elected to join Eagle's crew, along with the other gaijin former Guardsmen. The rest had been left on Daikoku with the Imperials. For Eagle's new crew, the five-week journey had been a constant round of preparation and simulation. Dev had an idea about how Eagle might run the Imperial blockade at New America, but it required every one of those thirty-three days for Eagle's crew, working with her AI, to get everything right and ready.

  Dev wondered again about the Confederation fleet, Tarazed, Mirach, Vindemiatrix, and all of the captured ships as well. He'd taken a terrific gamble with them.

  Almost as large a gamble as he was taking now with the Eagle.

  "One minute to breakout." That was the voice of Eagle's AI. Dev could sense the cascade of data flowing through the ship's network. With a pseudovelocity of a light-year per day, overshooting the meticulously calculated instant of breakout by one second could lead to an error of over 110 million kilometers. Only a ship's AI could calculate to that order of precision. Older ships frequently needed to make several K-T space transitions, creeping up on the target through a set of successively tighter calculations.

  "All hands," Dev broadcast. "Get ready. Remember, we're supposed to be Imperials. Don't shoot unless I give the word." He measured the flow of data through the navsystem. "Thirty seconds."

  Then it was time. Breakout.

  They dropped out of K-T space on the mark, ten AUs out from 26 Draconis A, with red dwarf B a tiny ruddy disk hanging in space to the left. There were ships . . . lots of ships, and all were broadcasting Imperial IFF on the fleet frequencies.

  "Start squawking," Dev said. Lara gave an order, and Eagle began broadcasting IFF of its own.

  The code had been part of the package handed over by Lloyd back at Daikokukichi, recorded when Ohka Squadron had docked at the Yards. With luck, fleet units in-system would register Eagle as another Imperial destroyer, arriving late, or as reinforcements from Earth.

  It would take some minutes for the burst of neutrinos marking Eagle's arrival, traveling at the speed of light, to reach Imperial ships sunward. Under Lara's steady guidance, the destroyer accelerated sharply, then fell toward New America, visible in the navsim display as one bright star among many.

  Minutes passed . . . slow-dragging. Certainly, the Imperials knew by now of Eagle's arrival. Dev and the others waited, listening, wondering what the response would be.

  "D983, D983," a voice called over the ship-to-ship audio. The number referred to Eagle's borrowed identification code. "This is Imperial picket Tosshin. We have received your IFF code transmission. Please confirm your ID visually. Over."

  So. They weren't going to take the IFF's word for it. Smart . . . and unfortunate, though Dev had been expecting a challenge. The stakes had just gone up a notch.

  "Transmitting vessel at zero-five-eight, ascension two-zero," Eagle's AI said, as a targeting diamond marked the corvette's position ahead and warbook data scrolled across Dev's vision. The picket was a small vessel, a Hari-class corvette of 800 tons, with a twenty-five-man crew. No match for a destroyer, its orders would be to challenge intruders and report to the Imperial's in-system headquarters.

  "Range, fourteen point four million kilometers," the AI continued after a brief pause. 'Time delay at that range, forty-eight seconds."

  "That's it," Dev told the human components of Eagle's linked network. "Let 'er rip!"

  One of Eagle's watch officers gave the actual command, loosing a ViRcom laser transmission stored in Eagle's memory. Traveling at the speed of light, it would reach the Imperial corvette in less than fifty seconds.

  Then, in fifty seconds more, allowing for the time delay of any return broadcast, Eagle's anxiously waiting crew would know how effective their preparations had been.

  Chapter 15

  In the days before cephlinks and virtual reality, of course, EW—Electronic Warfare—was restricted to mean those tactics employed by opposing forces to learn about the enemy's dispositions by listening in on his radio and radar transmissions, while simultaneously baffling his attempts to do the same through jamming and various types of electronic countermeasures.

  With ViRcommunications, of course, the game became far more complicated, and deadly.

  —Man and the Stars: A History of Technology

  Ieyasu Sutsumi

  C.E. 2531

  When Dev and Katya had lifted off from Eridu in an ascraft months before, they'd been pursued by Imperial warships, by Amatukaze-class destroyers identical to the Eagle, in fact. As with all ship-to-ship communications, the ViRcom exchanges between Dev and Arasi's captain had been recorded, both by Dev's own cephlink and by the ascraft's lasercom circuits. By downloading those records to Eagle's link network, the destroyer's AI had been able to create a computer analogue of the captain of the Imperial destroyer
Arasi.

  This is Taisa Yasuo Ihara, the computer-generated image had said, mimicking perfectly the real Ihara's gruff manner and harsh-slurred Nihongo. Captain of the Imperial destroyer Arasi. I require direct passage to Ohka Squadron's operational area. Over.

  The time lag, as Eagle's lasercom transmission had crept across intervening space to the waiting corvette, then again as the corvette's lasered reply crawled back, had seemed interminable. Randi Lloyd had provided all of the current Imperial codes and passwords stored at Daikokukichi, as well as every scrap of electronic data he'd been able to record when Ohka Squadron had stopped at his base, but there was always the possibility that Ohka possessed some secret recognition code that Lloyd had not intercepted, or that a real messenger from Munimori would have some private access word agreed upon back on Earth. Of particular concern was whether Arasi and Captain Ihara were still at Eridu, as seemed likely, or whether in the past few months they'd been reassigned to Ohka.

  It would be suspicious, to say the least, if a destroyer claiming to be the Arasi dropped out of K-T space with a secret communique for Kawashima . . . and the real Arasi was already parked in orbit a few kilometers off Donryu's starboard side.

  "We have a return laser," Eagle's communications officer reported over the link. "They've acknowledged!"

  "Play it."

  A scene formed in Dev's mind as he accepted the transmission downlink. Giving a mental command, Dev took on a new ViRcomm persona . . . that of Taisa Ihara on Arasi's bridge, as reconstructed by Eagle's AI. According to ViRcomm protocol, the setting for any exchange was aboard the ship belonging to the higher-ranking officer; juniors always reported to their senior's bridge, never the other way around. Dev's persona was seated on a thronelike and purely imaginary seat, surrounded by the bulky jack modules for the bridge crew. Before him stood the persona of a Japanese naval officer in an immaculate dress uniform.