by Ian Douglas
He led Dev onto a curving, stone-walled path, around a garden of exotic night-blooming plants and up toward the estate proper. Taisho Yasunari Kodama's party had already been in full swing for hours, though guests continued to arrive as the night sky darkened overhead. The Admiral, a member of the Emperor's personal staff, was well-known for these affairs, and to be invited to one was not only an honor, it was considered a mark of special favor. For military personnel, at least, an invitation to Pulau Kodama indicated a rising career, even official Imperial notice.
Dev, tall, pale-complexioned, and unaccustomedly resplendent in the immaculate dress blacks of an Imperial army officer, stepped into the throng gathered on the veranda outside Kodama's imposing, sleekly modern hab. It was difficult to tell at a glance where outside ended and the building began, for walls and skylights were open to the night air, and dancing holographic sculptures shifted and interpenetrated in soft-glowing abstracts and geometrical patterns.
Hundreds of guests were already present, gathered in small groups for conversation and drinking, or swaying rhythmically in larger circles to the liquid ripplings and tone-shifting drips and plops of Hagiwara's water music. Attire, Dev noted, ran the gamut from full military dress with sword and honors to formal jackets or gowns to masquerade costumes to complete undress. Many of Kodama's guests, men and women both, were nude save for jewelry, richly ornate skin implants, elaborate masks, or headpieces. The military officers present were all Imperials, in army black or navy white, and all were high-ranking, taisa or above.
Which left Dev feeling unpleasantly out of place. He couldn't attend a function like this without surreptitiously checking from time to time to make certain that his tunic was clean, the folds of his arm cloak were hanging straight, and his gold braid aiguillettes were still secure on his shoulder. His rank of chu-i, equivalent to that of a Hegemony army lieutenant or a naval j.g., was startlingly junior in this gathering of shoshos and chujos, while the glittering civilians present included senior Imperial administrators, diplomats, well-known ViRdrama personalities, and even a few Hegemony governors returned to Earth from the frontier.
Still, the starburst medal at the throat of his blacks, the Teikokuno Hoshi, commanded a respect beyond that usually accorded the two cherry blossom pips of a chu-i on his collar tabs and shoulder boards. The Imperial Star had opened doors undreamed of just a year or two earlier. All things considered, Dev had done quite well for a gaijin—a non-Japanese—from the free housing warrens of BosWash.
A servant in a traditional kimono approached, bowed low, and offered him a sensphere.
"Arigato." Dev said, accepting the crystal sphere. It warmed pleasantly against his interface, inducing an erotic tingle and a mild euphoria as he walked deeper into the crowd. An Imperial Navy shosho, a rear admiral, smiled and nodded back as Dev inclined his head in a polite bow. Yes, he'd come far indeed for a gaijin. Pride and the stimulation of the sensphere mingled, countering self-doubt.
Scanning the throng for a familiar face, he saw only strangers and had to suppress an irrational disappointment. Kodama's hab, after all, was huge, and he'd seen only a tiny piece of it so far. But he still wanted to know: had she come? The black pillar of an information kiosk caught his eye, and he pressed his way toward it through the crowd. Shifting the sensphere to his right hand to free his interface, Dev placed his palm against the cool slickness of the pillar, framing his questions: Is Katya Alessandro here yet? If she is, where is she?
Answers formed in his mind as the hab's AI consulted its memory, then scanned through the hab's many rooms, levels, and balconies. A map drew itself in Dev's mind. He was here, near the main entrance. She was there . . . through the main foyer and out on the north veranda.
So she had come after all. Maybe she'd changed her mind, then, about leaving Earth. He hurried on into the central core of Kodama's hab.
The entire island belonged to Kodama. Once, it had been given over to a sprawling warehouse facility, part of the far-flung Towerdown complex encircling the base of Earth's oldest sky-el space tower some one hundred fifty kilometers south of Singapore. Fifty years earlier, however, Kodama's father, himself a member of the Imperial Court, had purchased the island, then loosed a cloud of nanotechnic converters on the place, stripping it to bedrock and transforming the sterile ranks of storage towers into this palatial estate—a small city in one building, actually—clinging to a mountaintop above impenetrable, genetically nangineered jungle.
Though the Inglic word hab suggested a permanent habitation, Kodama rarely lived here, but it was a spectacular place for a party. The main foyer was like a cathedral's interior, the vaulted ceiling three stories overhead. Gene-tailored koi of fantastic shapes, miniature dragons and whales and indescribable monstrosities, swam in the stone pool beneath shifting patterns of holographic geometry. The walls were lost in stars, and the thronging thousand or so people in the room seemed to stand on empty space, with the vast, crimson-cored pinwheel of the galaxy turning slowly beneath their feet.
Following the map still outlined in his cephlink RAM, Dev made his way to the north veranda. Through a shimmering veil of liquid light, more dozens of people were gathered outside on a railed balcony overlooking jungle, silver beaches, and island-dotted sea.
"Excuse me," a woman's sultry voice said at his back. Her Nihongo had the crisp precision of someone using a downloaded RAM language implant. "Are you Devis Cameron? The one who destroyed the Xenos?"
He turned at the voice and found himself facing a cute Eurasian woman wearing sandals, a startling spray of peacock tail feathers as a halo about her lavender hair, and little else. An intricate pattern of loops and whorls etched in glowing gold descended from her right shoulder to her wrist, bright enough to cast shadows that shifted across her skin in interesting patterns as she moved.
"Destroyed them? No. I was with the team that first managed to talk with them, though, out at GhegnuRish."
The woman rubbed her sensphere against her cheek with slow, sensuous movements as she listened to him, but her violet eyes lacked any trace of comprehension. "I ViRed what you did out there," she said, her voice dropping to an intimate huskiness as she shifted to deliciously accented Inglic. "It was wonderful!"
The way she said the words triggered memory. Dev thought he recognized her now . . . a well-known erotic ViRdrama actress. He was a little taken aback. He was certain he'd enjoyed simming as her lover more than once—through a recjack linkage, of course—but he could remember neither her name nor the scenarios she'd played in.
"Just—ah—lucky. I was in the right place at the right time."
He didn't add that he'd stumbled into a hole in the ruins of a long-dead city on the DalRiss homeworld, fallen into a cavern deep underground, and there confronted the alien horror known to Man as the Xenophobes only because he'd had little choice. A DalRiss biological construct, a sheath of living tissue on his arm called a comel, had enabled him to touch some part of the Xenophobe's mind, enough to learn a little about what it was and how it viewed the universe.
"Oh, no" the woman breathed, her peacock feathers rustling, their eyespot patterns faintly luminous in the dim light. "You're far too modest. I understand that, because of what you did down in that awful cave, the Empire's won the Xeno war!"
"Well, let's hope so." Dev decided that it wouldn't do any good to explain reality to her. His brief contact with a Xeno world mind had taught him something about that enigmatic blend of biological organism and submicroscopic nanomachine. The war would be continuing for a long time to come, but he very much doubted that the girl was interested in Xeno life cycles or worldviews or that she'd believe him if he told her the truth. Looking past her, he thought he saw a familiar silhouette against the moonlight on the veranda.
"Uh, excuse me," he said, breaking away just as she took a step closer. "Shitsurei shimasu. There's someone over there I have to see."
"Hurry back, Devis. I'm looking forward to finding out all about Earth's greatest hero."
Some hero, Dev thought, with an ironic cock of an eyebrow. He'd been scared.
Katya Alessandro stood on the veranda, lithe and slender in her Hegemony dress grays, in sharp contrast to the gaily clad or disrobed people around her. The moon hung enormous, low in the east behind her. The night was clear, the white razor slash of the sky-el starkly visible from the north horizon, where it rose in splendor against the orange sky glow of Singapore's lights, clear to the zenith, where it dwindled and was lost among the stars.
"Hello, Katya," he said, walking over to her. "I'm glad you came."
She looked at him, an unfathomable expression locked away behind eyes of ice. "I'm still not so sure this was such a good idea. Dev."
Katya's collar tabs proclaimed her a tai-i, an army captain, but her uniform was that of the Hegemony Guard, not Imperial. Once she'd been Dev's commanding officer in Alessandro's Assassins, A Company, 1st Battalion of the 5th Loki Warstrider regiment, the Thorhammers. Then they'd gone to the DalRiss worlds, and the confrontation with the Xenophobes on Alya B-V.
Like Dev, Katya had been offered an Imperial commission, but to his surprise she'd turned it down cold, preferring to remain with the Thorhammers. She looked more out of place here among all the Imperial white and black than he did.
Well, to be honest, he'd turned down the posting too, at first, but that had been before his sponsors at the Imperial Court had pointed out how valuable his firsthand expertise on the Xenophobes could be. Then too, there was the matter of his father. . . .
He smiled at her.
"I really wanted to see you before you left," he said. "And, well . . ." He gestured at the glittering crowd around them. "You don't turn down an invitation from Admiral Kodama!"
"Maybe you don't." Her words were cold. "This scenario isn't for me, Dev. Thank God I don't have to be part of it any longer."
"So? Why'd you agree to come tonight?"
"Because you insisted. And because I'm going up-tower in another ten hours."
"And then where?" He offered her his sensphere, but she refused with a curt shake of her head. Her dark hair was close-cropped at the sides, longer on top, a style that left the silver rings of the T-sockets behind her ears free. They gleamed in the moonlight as she moved.
"I'm leaving for the Frontier, Dev. My early out with the Hegemony came through. This is good-bye."
"I . . . don't want you to go. I thought we had something together."
An expression passed over her face, one of . . . was it weariness? Reaching out, she flicked the Imperial Star at his throat with her finger, the sound a tiny click of nail on metal. "I'm afraid this got between us somehow."
"It doesn't need to." He was surprised at how angry his own words sounded. "Things aren't as bad as you sometimes pretend they are."
"Come on, Dev," Katya said. "Look around you!" She gestured at the crowd on the veranda with a grimace of distaste, taking in glittering and perfumed Court parasites, a nude man jacked glassy-eyed into a pleasure sim, a half dozen bureaucrats in elaborate, 100-sen-en cloaks, and three women in the corner in an erotic embrace that must have been embarrassing to someone of Katya's rather provincial background.
He smiled and shook his head a little sadly. Katya had always been a bit uncomfortable in the Shakai, as the blend of culture, manners, refinement, and, she would say, the decadence of Japanese society was called. They'd had this discussion before, in more private places. He knew she felt as though the character of the Frontier worlds was being swallowed by the more relaxed culture of Shakai.
Dev quickly changed the subject.
"Please, at least tell me where you're going." He ground the sensphere against his palm implant with a deliberate, rolling pressure. The induced stimulation was already quickening his senses, adding extra dimensions to the gurgling tones of the water music, to Katya's musky scent mingled with the heavier odors of perfume and jungle and salt air. "Loki? New America?"
The 5th Loki, the Thorhammers, had originally been raised as a planetary militia, the 2nd New American Minutemen, and New America was Katya's homeworld. If she was really leaving Hegemony service, she would probably go back there.
"Away from Earth and the Empire." Katya said.
"I wish you'd change your mind."
"And I wish you'd open your eyes, Dev. I wish you'd see what the Empire is, what it's doing. . . ."
Dev shook his head slightly, eyes narrowing. Admiral Kodama probably wasn't in the habit of eavesdropping on his guests, but his hab AI was almost certainly keyed to pick up on certain words or phrases. Rebellion, say, or Empire. Just to be on the safe side.
"Arts and entertainment," he said softly, a veiled warning. The so-called civilized pursuits, techno-art and virtual entertainment, were the universally accepted safe topics for casual discussion.
"I've said nothing treasonous," she said, defiant, daring him to say more. "And they don't own my mind. Not yet. And admit it. The fact that you feel you have to shut me up proves just how bad things are getting—here on Earth, anyway."
Dev clamped down on an immediate, almost automatic retort. Arguing with Katya here and now would accomplish nothing, save, possibly, getting them a visit tomorrow from Imperial Security. They'd argued politics more than once before, and Dev found the whole subject tiresome. It had been the one source of friction between them since they'd arrived on Earth two months earlier.
He hated to see her leave, but he didn't want her to make trouble for herself. Earlier, when he'd first called her, he'd been unwilling to see her within the artificial intimacy of a ViRcom. It was on his insistence that she'd come corporally to Kodama's hab tonight at all. She'd wanted to say good-bye over the ViRcom, but he hadn't wanted to settle for Katya's virtual presence. He'd needed to see her, to touch her in person.
That was a mistake, he now realized.
"Things really aren't so bad."
"Are you saying that for yourself, Dev? Or for your father?"
"Leave him out of it!"
Shosho Michal Cameron had been an Imperial naval officer, one of only a handful of gaijin to be given a slot on the Emperor's staff. Later, however, in command of an Imperial K-T drive warship, he'd destroyed the sky-el on Lung Chi to keep the Xenophobes from reaching an evacuation fleet at synchorbit, an act that had doomed half a million civilians and five thousand Imperial Marines still on the planet's surface. The elder Cameron had been disgraced by that action and later had committed suicide. Only recently, after Dev's encounter with the Xenos at Alya B-V, had he been officially and posthumously rehabilitated.
"You're wrong about the Empire, you know," Dev went on, his voice pitched scarcely above a whisper. "Except for the odd insurrection or two, they've kept Man at peace for better than three centuries. The Core Worlds are prospering, the Frontier worlds are as free as they can be—"
"Good God, Dev, why don't you link in and switch on? The Frontier has just as much freedom as the length of the Empire's leash. They control our trade with Earth and with the other colonies, tax us to death, and tell us we can't develop our own technological base . . . 'for our own good.' But then, you're an Earther, aren't you? Core World. So you wouldn't understand how we feel on the Frontier."
"Yeah," Dev said, his own anger rising. Their arguments had followed this pattern before, and he knew the script. "I'm from Earth and I'm proud of it. I'm also proud to be an Imperial officer." He touched the starburst at his throat. "I'm proud of this."
"Don't be too proud of that trinket. Remember, I was there too."
Yes, she'd been there. She'd descended into that pitch-black hole after he'd fallen in, overcoming old, old nightmares of the dark to come after him. She'd loved him once. What had happened to them?
"Katya—"
"Good-bye, Dev," she said firmly. "We won't be seeing each other again. Congratulations on your new posting."
"Uh, thanks. But—"
"And if I catch you and your Imperial friends on New America, you're dead meat." She turned sharply at that
and walked away. Dev started to go after her, then stopped. It was over. Clearly and definitely, his relationship with Katya was over.
And, like his insisting on seeing her in person, maybe that relationship had been a mistake as well.
Chapter 2
There are those, particularly among the ultra-Green radicals, who hold that Man, as defined by his culture and technology, is no longer entirely human. The focus of their argument, of course, is implant technology.
Consider: nanotechnically grown cephlinks and RAM intracranial implants, palm interfaces and link sockets, have utterly transformed work, entertainment, economics, communication, education, indeed, have revolutionized every aspect of civilization over the past four centuries. The Greens miss a crucial point. Man's tools may well be the foundational basis for his evolution. The crude, chipped-stone implements of Australopithecus, by improving his diet and encouraging an upright stance, may well have put him solidly on the path to Homo erectus: who can today imagine the final destination of the path we have already chosen?
—Man and His Works
Karl Gunther Fielding
C.E. 2448
Two weeks later, Dev was up-tower at Singapore Orbital, continuing his almost single-handed crusade before the Imperial Staff and the Council of the United Terran Hegemony to implement the plan that had become known as Operation Yunagi. He'd returned to his quarters and downloaded the day's accumulation of messages from his console. Some small, irrational part of him continued to hope that there'd be a message from Katya, even though she must still be en route to New America.
Travel times between the stars being what they were, it would be two months at least before he could expect something from her. New America—26 Draconis IV—was 48.6 light-years from Sol, clear out on the fringe of the Shichiju's Frontier. Typical travel times for the big liners averaged about a light-year per day, a fast courier carrying mail perhaps twice that, and . . . well, the numbers spoke for themselves.