“A just and unemotional deference to the principles of reason demands that we explain our position clearly and without equivocation. Why should the rule of law given precedent by centuries of peace be called now into question? In explanation, then, we make these assertions:
“We hold that the vast distances sundering world from world and system from system serve to insulate the worlds of Mankind’s diaspora from one another and from Earth, and that government cannot adequately bridge so vast a gap of time, space, and culture;
“We hold that the differences between mutually alien, albeit human cultures render impossible a thorough understanding of the needs, necessities, aspirations, goals, and dreams of those disparate worlds by any central governing body;
“We hold that the seizure of the wealth and property of our citizens on pain of imprisonment or suit is indistinguishable from armed robbery, that the forced servitude of our people on foreign worlds is indistinguishable from slavery, that the continued assimilation of diverse cultures into societal patterns determined by those claiming to represent popular opinion is indistinguishable from genocide;
“Further, we hold that human culture, economy, and aspirations are too varied to administer, regulate, or restrict by any means, but should be free, allowing each to thrive or fail on its own merits;
“That human rights derive neither from God nor from human government or institutions nor from precedent, but from a people’s willingness to secure and maintain those rights for themselves;
“That every individual bears the responsibility for his own actions, and that personal liberty conveys no right to deprive others of life, liberty, or property; neither can what is regarded as morally wrong for the individual be considered morally right for government;
“That the only just role for government in human affairs is as defense against force or fraud;
“That when government no longer represents its people, that when government representatives advance their own interests at the expense of the people, that when legal attempts by the people to represent themselves and their interests and to redress the wrongs of the government prove ineffectual, that when government manifestly threatens the principles of individual liberty, then the people have not the right but the responsibility for reforming or, at need, changing that government.…”
There was more, a lot more, all of it following the same general thread, that people didn’t have to let some amorphous and all-wise government think for them, but had the right… no, the duty to think for themselves. Katya wasn’t entirely sure she believed all that was said. If there were no taxes—that line about seizure of wealth and property had caught her ear—how could the government keep open the trade routes between the worlds? If individual freedoms took precedence over public welfare, what was to stop someone from screaming “Fire!” in a crowded room? Or operating a groundcar or skimmer while a current trickled through the pleasure center of his brain?
Well, perhaps that line about individual responsibility covered that… but she still had the feeling that this Declaration of Reason was being just a bit glib on that point.
Nevertheless, she had a large, unyielding lump in her throat as she listened to the rest of the address, and she noticed that the crowd thronging the square was as silent and as still as if they’d been somehow suspended in time.
“We declare, therefore, that the Worlds of Man are and should be mutually sovereign, mutually independent of central authority, mutually free to pursue what they perceive as their own best interests, so long as those interests do not abridge the freedoms of their neighbors.
“And we further declare that the government of the United Terran Hegemony, having forfeited its right to govern through careless disregard of the needs and petitions of its citizens, can no longer be the legitimate and representative government for those worlds and peoples signatory to this contract, but that the said relationship between governed and governors is henceforth dissolved.
“It is the firm desire of the signatories of this declaration to live in peace with all men and all worlds, but we hereby pledge our devotion to the principles of individual liberty outlined in this document with a firm determination to uphold these principles in the face of coercion, intimidation, imprisonment, and death.
“To this we pledge our lives, our honor, and our trust as members of a common humanity.”
What, Katya wondered, would the Xenophobes make of that? Nothing much, she decided, since concepts like “individual” and “personal” were wholly alien to them. She remembered again the Xenophobe’s touch, and shuddered.
But the human members of the audience accepted the declaration with profound emotion. For long seconds after Sinclair’s image had stopped speaking, there was silence… and then the square erupted in a thunderous ovation, in screams and cheers and roared approval. Scanning the crowd, Katya saw people on their knees in prayer, people in tears, people with their arms upraised and their eyes closed in a kind of ecstasy born of mass acclamation.
But others were in motion, surging toward the line of Centurian warstriders.
For one fragile moment, Katya thought that perhaps the Centurians were not going to fire, that the advancing crowd had caught them off-guard or that they could not bring themselves to fire on civilians. Then the Warlord’s twin particle cannons thundered, twin bolts of blue-white light lashing the charging mob. Screams rose above the mob thunder, and Katya felt the icy touch of horror.
“Aim for their weapons!” she ordered. “Watch for the civilians!”
“Targeting!” Hagan yelled. His Scoutstrider’s laser fired an instant later, striking the Warlord’s left arm close to the shoulder joint.
Katya fired an instant later, wondering how many unarmed civilians would die in the ricochets of explosive rounds and the sweep of laser beams that would surely follow.
One of the Centurian Scoutstriders was trembling, then rocking back and forth as the crowd surged about its legs, pushing first one way, then the other. Its torso lashed about, its laser firing, scoring bloody, smoking paths through the sea of humanity before it, but then the mob hit it from the left like ocean breakers crashing against the shore, and the twenty-ton, three-and-a-half-meter-tall warstrider toppled over with flailing arms and a grinding crash.
Katya could hear the screams of the wounded over the roar of the crowd, but louder and louder came a thundering chant, a thousand voices or more picking up the theme and magnifying it: ‘Tanis! Tanis! Tanis!” She caught a glimpse of the Scoutstrider’s operator as he was hauled from his slot, but only a glimpse. He vanished beneath the crowd an instant later.
With infinite care she moved forward, fearful of treading on the densely packed, screaming, banner-waving mass of humanity before her. Both of the Warlord’s particle cannons were smoking now, disabled by near-point-blank bursts of laser fire from the rebel striders. The other striders seemed hesitant to open fire, but a thick fog hung in the air… gas of some kind. God, we’ve got to win this quick, she thought.
Some Hegemony troops opened fire on the crowd and died. Some turned over their weapons without a fight and most lived. Some actually joined the crowd’s roaring charge.
One Guard Scoutstrider shook off the spell that held its operator and fired some sort of close-in, shotgun-type weapon, a bursting shell that mowed down a column of civilians in a bloody, tangled mass. A bottle, flame streaming from its neck, arced through the air, struck the RLN-90 high up on its torso, and exploded in writhing flames. A second bottle followed, and a third, and then a rocket round from a shoulder-fired launcher streaked low above the crowd and struck the burning strider squarely in its side. The crippled machine kept trying to move, until several laser bolts from Hagan’s machine stopped it for good. Katya waited for the pilot’s ejection, but it never came.
The surviving warstriders were retreating now, unable to face the sheer, ferocious weight of Babel’s civilian population. The Warlord broke to Katya’s left, making for the south end of the dome. Wi
th few civilians blocking her path in that direction. Katya changed course and angled for an intercept.
The Warlord’s high-velocity cannon, a squat dome-shaped turret mounted on the dorsal surface of its hull, loosed a buzzsaw burst of depleted uranium slugs that slammed into the Ghostrider and nearly smashed her to the ground. Lipinski, controlling the LaG-42’s missile launchers, loosed a short-range ripple-fired volley of M-490 rockets that savaged the bigger machine’s left leg and nearly brought it down. She locked onto a weak spot, a laser scar in the RS-64’s armor near the leg actuator joints, and fired pulse after pulse of 100-megawatt laser energy into duralloy plate suddenly glowing white-hot. The left joint gave suddenly, bolts of lightning jaggedly caressing tortured armor as main power leads shorted out. The machine ground to a halt, and as Katya’s Ghostrider moved closer, the crewmen ejected in a one-two-three sequence of smoke and noise.
It didn’t help. The crowd caught them almost before their chute-slowed capsules finished bouncing off the pavement. Katya turned away, unable to stop what happened next, and unable to watch it.
“Tanis! Tanis! Tarns!”
She had never imagined a battle quite like this one.
Chapter 30
The first warflyers were man-jacked constructors and workpods equipped with maneuvering thrusters, indispensable for heavy construction work on the synchorbitals and other big orbital facilities. By 2250, forty-three years after the first military use of warstriders, orbital workpods were being armed for sentry and customs inspections. Slower and with less range than conventional space fighters, they have greater armor and endurance. Nonetheless, they have seen only limited use in combat.
—Armored Combat. A Modem Military Overview
Heisaku Ariyoshi
C.E. 2523
“They’ve just gone to General Quarters,” Anders said over Dev’s intercom circuit. “Looks like we have to do it the hard way.”
Dev agreed. “Launch the warflyers.”
Warflyers were little more than converted warstriders, with legs replaced by cryo-H tanks and strap-on maneuvering thrusters. The two DR-80 Tenrai craft—Tenrai was Nihongo for “Heavenly Thunder”—had been captured by the raid at Nimrod that rescued Dev and the other Terran Rangers. Each massed twelve tons—eighteen with a full load of reaction mass—and was essentially a small, self-contained spacecraft. They could not reach orbit by themselves, nor could they reenter atmosphere for a landing. Instead, they were carried to and from orbit in ascraft rider slots, just as striders were transported to landing zones on a planet’s surface.
Silently in the vacuum of space, panels blew clear of the Moketuki’s belly, spinning end over end as they drifted into the night. The DR-80s, secured by magnetic grippers inside the ascraft’s riderslots, dropped free a second later. Just under fifteen minutes out from the Babylon orbital facility, Shippurport was visible only as a webwork of distant lights surmounting the razor-slash gleam of the sky-el. To Dev, it resembled a spider’s web glittering with sunlit droplets of dew, indescribably delicate and beautiful.
The laser defenses hidden within that beauty must be targeting them at this very moment.
“Laser com functional,” Simone reported. “We’re linked.”
Neither warflyer was manned, save for the Artificial Intelligences residing in their on-board computers. The odds were high that both craft would be destroyed in seconds. Instead, two of the ascraft’s passengers, Harald Nicholson and Torolf Bondevik, had jacked in from their acceleration couches on the flight deck and were controlling the flyers through teleoperation.
Both of the former Thorhammers were Lokans, with experience doing this kind of work at Loki’s Asgard synchorbital. They fired the DR-80s’ main thrusters almost in unison, accelerating out from the shadow of the pirated ascraft.
“Quite a view,” Nicholson said over the general frequency. “Sensors are recording a power-up zero-three-zero, plus zero-seven.”
“Got it.” Bondevik said. “Cloudscreen is armed.”
“Fire!”
A bolt of light streaked from the central hull of one of the warflyers, followed a beat later by a launch from the other. The missiles, high-speed Starhawks, had a range of over one hundred kilometers. Though Imperial Starhawks could carry nukes, Hegemony weapons were limited to conventional warheads. These carried EWC-167 nanomunitions packs, and their twin detonations a moment later, a silent double flare of white light, released trillions of minute, nano-generated motes that gleamed in the sunlight like mirrored shields.
For centuries, engineers had searched for the key to the mythical “force field” of ViRdrama fictions. While numerous magnetic screens existed—such were vital for manned craft penetrating gas giant radiation belts, for example, or in the inner planetary systems of red dwarf flare stars—the magical defensive shield that could reflect lasers and charged particle bolts as well as nuclear missiles had remained a dream of science fiction.
Cloudscreens were the next best thing, however, for what couldn’t be seen or tracked by radar could not be accurately targeted. Two hundred kilometers from the synchorbital docking port, the twin, silvery clouds slowly merged and continued to drift toward the port with a closing speed of nearly ten kilometers per second. Behind the cloud, the ascraft shuttle and the two warflyers accelerated together, pacing the cloud, hidden in its opaque radar shadow.
Lasers lashed out from the docked Tokitukaze and from small defensive turrets on the synchorbit facility itself. The beams left dazzling trails as they vaporized paths through the dust, but the cloud rapidly absorbed and dispersed each beam, while continuing to shield the attackers. Radar and ladar returned only the blank, silvery disks of the approaching clouds.
Missiles could have penetrated the cloud, of course, and used on-board AIs to identify and track the targets, but they could not be launched while the ship was docked. Orders were given to cast off from the port facility, but it would be minutes yet before the countless power and data links between ship and port could be secured. Meanwhile, the Imperial destroyer’s missile tubes were blocked by the docking shroud, unable to turn their nuclear-tipped fury against the attackers.
And they had only seconds.
The cloudscreen swept across the port facility, a silent storm, the silvery dust already dispersing to transparency but packing inertia enough in each microscopic particle to scour painted numbers and insignia from duralloy surfaces, and sending spacesuited workers and workpods scurrying for shelter behind intervening superstructures. Transplas windows frosted over in seconds, and inside the synchorbital and aboard the docked destroyer, the drumming tick of hurtling dust sounded like the hissing-roar of ocean surf.
The surf roar subsided as the cloud swept past, rapidly thinning, bound now at far greater than escape velocity for deep space. As the skies surrounding the synchorbital and the docked warship faded to transparency, the first high-explosive warheads struck.
“I see three other big Impie ships. What the hell are those?”
“Transports. Don’t sweat ’em. Watch your closing rate.”
“Copy. I’ve got the lead.…”
Dev listened silently to the ViRcommunications between Nicholson and Bondevik. It was hard to realize that both men were silently strapped into couches back on the shuttle’s flight deck, and not actually aboard the two warflyers as they swiftly closed with the docked Imperial destroyer.
Each had loosed two more Starhawk missiles, these packing HE warheads, seconds after the cloud had engulfed the spaceport. Linking their cephlinks with the ascraft shuttle’s AI, they’d computed accelerations, courses, and times with lightning speed and inhuman accuracy; the four Starhawks reached the Tokitukaze’s hull seconds after the cloudscreen began to dissipate.
“I’ve got a solid lock,” Bondevik called. “Guiding home… hit!”
White light flared against the destroyer’s port side. They were close enough now that Dev could clearly see the Tokitukaze, the forward third of its wedge-shaped length still engulfe
d by the docking shroud and the webwork of orbital gantries. Twisted fragments of wreckage spun across the night, and Dev could see the gantry frameworks rippling and twisting with the stress of the impact.
“Right behind you,” Nicholson said. Dev saw the next missile, a minute point of light darting for the ragged. IR-glowing gap in the destroyer’s port side. The spark flared, dazzlingly bright, then faded. “Damn! They nailed it. Switching to Two.”
Dev’s viewpoint was through a long-range, image-enhanced optical scanner aboard Bondevik’s flyer. With a thought, he shifted his point of view to Nicholson’s second missile. For a moment, he saw what Nicholson was seeing, the flank of the Imperial destroyer swelling with alarming speed, the ragged hole punched in her side by the first missile bracketed by target lock discretes, the flicker of numbers in one corner of the field showing the rapidly dwindling range. He had only a fleeting impression of the destroyer’s sheer bulk, caught a glimpse of another soundless explosion to the right as Bondevik’s second missile was taken out by a defensive laser battery.…
The hole in the Tokitukaze’s side expanded into a gaping cavern. Dev felt like he was hurtling through the cavern’s mouth, sensed a tangle of wreckage and blast-twisted bulkheads ahead… and then his mind was filled with the staticky, hissing snow of a sharply broken ViRcom link.
His vision cleared with only a flicker of delay. He was aboard the shuttle once more, trailing the two flyers by nearly one hundred kilometers. Eridu’s synchorbital facility had expanded to fill most of the sky ahead, a bewildering tangle of beams, struts, lights, tethers, storage tanks, and habitats. He could pick out the Tokitukaze now without enhancement. White fog—frozen air and water—was boiling into space from the double hit amidships.
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