Warstrider: All Six Novels and An Original Novella

by Ian Douglas

  Besides, that last time he'd seen her she'd been pretty flat-out definite about not wanting to see him again, ever. He had the room prepare him a drink, which was delivered in a squeeze bottle. One wall was set to show Earth, a cloud-wreathed, three-quarters' sphere hanging in space. Dev floated in the microgravity of synchorbit, trying to turn his mind from Katya to something productive.

  To Yunagi.

  The Nihongo word was a poetic reference to the calm that falls at evening. Operation Yunagi had been Dev's single-minded pursuit for almost the entire two and a half months since he and Katya had returned from the Alyan expedition. It had been his idea, one he'd first discussed at length with Katya, then later with the Emperor's military staff. He was the acknowledged expert on the Xenophobes for the simple reason that he'd actually brushed minds with one; a small part of that alien presence was still with him, giving him a unique perspective on the Xenos . . . and on humans as well.

  What had that ViRsim actress said at Kodama's party? He concentrated for a moment, retrieving the girl's image and words from his RAM: I understand that, because of what you did down in that awful cave, the Empire's won the Xeno war!

  No, they hadn't won yet, but Dev was convinced that Yunagi would make that final victory, that final peace of the evening calm, possible. His thoughts flashed to Katya for a moment, as he wished she could have enjoyed his success . . . then drew back sharply. Damn!

  Katya's comment about his father had bitten deep. He didn't like to admit, even to himself, that the elder Cameron's unprecedented transfer to the Imperial Navy had had anything to do with his own success. It felt to Dev as though he'd been battling his father's shadow for a long time now. With the award of the Teikokuno Hoshi from the Emperor's own hand, he'd finally stepped into the sunshine on his own and even managed to make peace with his father's ghost. Michal Cameron was no longer on the Navy's lists as a traitor.

  Hegemony and Empire. The two together straddled the worlds of Man like a colossus. Imperial Nihon ruled directly a relatively small percentage of Earth's surface—the home islands, the Philippines, and a scattering of territorial enclaves ranging from the states of the Indian subcontinent to Kamchatka and Vancouver. By puppet governments and the presence of Imperial Marines, they dominated perhaps half the planet beyond those borders, maintaining the Teikokuno Heiwa, the Imperial Peace, in such scattered former war zones as central Asia, South China, and Africa.

  Japan's real political presence, however, was expressed through its silent control of the Hegemony, the interstellar government consisting of fifty-two member nations on Earth, plus the seventy-eight colonized worlds in seventy-two star systems that comprised the far-flung Shichiju. Technically autonomous, the extrasolar colonies were overseen—ruled was too harsh a word—by governors appointed in Kyoto. Local planetary governments made laws, managed industry, and even maintained armies, the planetary militias, in almost total freedom.

  The single restriction lay in the Hegemony's control of trade and travel between the stars and of the technology that made such travel possible. Only Hegemonic and Imperial ships possessed the K-T drives that let them cruise the Kamisama no Taiyo, the "Ocean of God" that reduced to days or months voyages that otherwise would have taken decades or centuries.

  Katya, Dev knew, saw Japan's monopoly on space-based technology and trade as tyranny, its taxes on colonial industries as crippling, its veto power over Hegemony affairs as nothing less than absolute dictatorship. For Dev, the system had its faults but it possessed one notable advantage: it worked. Until the first of the Xenophobe incursions, the Japanese had kept the peace for three centuries, save for a few inevitable isolated uprisings and the odd minor rebellion. By retaining sole control of nuclear weaponry they'd kept a fragmented humanity from destroying itself. And for the past forty years, they'd coordinated the Shichiju's defense against the Xenophobes, succeeding—usually—where the scattered response of dozens of frontier worlds would certainly have failed.

  On the other hand, he understood Katya's bitterness toward the Shichiju's masters even if he didn't fully share the feeling himself. Certainly, some individual freedoms were restricted under the Imperial Peace. Citizens of the former United States in particular had long traditions of domestic independence that had been sharply curtailed by the Hegemonic Act of Union three centuries before, and in some areas bitterness against Imperial Japan still ran surprisingly deep. There'd been some ugly incidents; the Vancouver Massacre of '21 and the Metrochicagan Riots were still fresh in most Americans' minds.

  Those attitudes had spread to the half dozen or so worlds of the Shichiju where colonists of American descent had tried to resurrect some measure of their imagined past glories. Worlds like New America, Katya's homeworld. She might have been raised in that planet's Ukrainian colony, but she'd obviously been infected by the positively ancient, conservative atmosphere of the place.

  All things considered, Dev thought, the Empire was at worst a cumbersome and unwieldy bureaucracy, but at best the instrumentality that had made Man's outreach to the stars, even his very survival, possible. In his firm opinion it was both. For him and his family, the Empire had long been both blessing and curse.

  To begin with, Michal Cameron had been forced to divorce his wife when he won his appointment to the Imperial Navy. Command officers, those ranking captain and above, were expected to marry for political advantage and to mingle within circles defined by the Imperial Court, and Mary Jean Pruitt-Cameron—a gaijin girl from West Scranton who couldn't even speak Nihongo—simply hadn't been of the proper social class. A new marriage had been arranged for Michal by the Emperor's Council of Protocol.

  Even so, Michal had been allowed to retain his former wife as mistress, and he'd been able to provide for his two sons. Dev would never have been able otherwise to acquire his hardware, an NOI Model 10,000 Cephimplant, with left-palm-embedded control interface, twin temporal sockets, and a cervical receiver for direct feedback work.

  Without those high-priced C- and T-sockets, Dev Cameron would never have shaken free of Earth or the Hegemony Protectorate Arcology. He would have been just another of the hundred million BosWash citizens plugged into recjack feeds and living on the Fukushi dole, the welfare handouts provided by the government to its unemployable citizens.

  After his father's disgrace and suicide. Dev had nursed a black bitterness toward the Empire, but he'd not been able to maintain such personal hatred toward so large and impersonal a system for long. From Dev's point of view, it was his father's enemies who had rigged the court-martial's outcome, not the system. The Empire was far, far larger than any individual citizen, larger even than the Emperor himself.

  His father's disgrace had very nearly ended his own career as well, and before it was properly started. He'd already received his appointment to the Hegemonic Naval Academy at Singapore when word of the Lung Chi disaster reached Earth, and the appointment had been quietly revoked after the court-martial, "to avoid unfortunate repercussions to the Academy's reputation." Ultimately, Dev had taken working passage aboard the freighter Mintaka to the Frontier just to escape the onus of his father's name, but that could hardly be blamed on the Empire, could it?

  Nor was it the Empire's fault that, after joining the Hegemony Guard on Loki, he'd been selected, not for ship training as he'd requested, but as a striderjack.

  All his life Dev had wanted to be a shipjack, and he'd picked up plenty of experience aboard the Mintaka, jacking everything from cargo handlers to second helm. Even now he still found it surprising that, after years of dreaming about cruising the godsea as a starship, he'd ended up jacking warstriders. He'd never wanted anything to do with the lumbering fighting machines, the heavy mobile armor of twenty-sixth-century warfare, and had always looked down on the men and women who ran them. It had taken a hard-fought campaign against the Xenophobes infesting Loki, followed by the four-month voyage to contact the DalRiss symbionts of distant Alya to convince him that it was the people who counted in a fight, not the
technology, and certainly not the outward form of his cybernetic prosthesis. He was proud now of his skill at handling LaG-42 Ghostriders or ponderous Warlords, and he rarely thought anymore about jacking starships.

  Dev had changed a lot in the past couple of years, in his attitude and in his relationships with other people. Once he'd been stiff, suspicious, even hostile with those he didn't know, a loner who insisted on doing things his own way. Now he got on well with everybody . . . nearly everybody, at least. Katya's rejection still burned. He'd loved that fiery Ukrainian company commander—still did, if the turmoil he was feeling now meant anything.

  A chimed note interrupted increasingly bleak thoughts, shaking Dev from a gloomy contemplation of the cloud-swathed Earth below. Someone was asking for a ViRcom link. He concentrated on the mental formula that unlocked the communications circuit in his cephlink implant.

  The thought materialized his analogue ViRpersona, attired in dress blacks and with the Imperial Star at his throat. In his own mind, he stood, seemingly unmoving and unprotected in open space, Earth beneath his boots, the gleaming thread of the sky-el dwindling with the perspective of distance against the clouds below and the star-dusted night above.

  "Chu-i Devis Cameron?" The woman's voice seemed to speak from emptiness beside his left ear.

  "Yes?"

  "Excuse the interruption, sir, but Taisa Kukuei Tsuru desires immediate ViRcom linkage. Will you accept?"

  "Of course."

  The rank of taisa was equivalent to a colonel in a planetary militia, but rank was less important here than position. Tsuru, Dev knew, was an Imperial Liaison, one of some tens of thousands of Japanese officers who served as links between the Imperial government and the Hegemony military forces. Their word carried the mass of official orders, even when delivered to ranks nominally superior to their own. Theoretically, a raw sho-i, if he were a liaison officer, could give orders to a Hegemony general, though such a situation would never be allowed to occur in practice simply because senior officers could not afford to lose face. The sho-i might advise that general, however . . . and the general would be expected to listen carefully. Imperial Liaisons carried considerable political clout.

  Their own name for themselves was Annaisha, "Guides."

  Tsuru's ViRcom analogue, the "public mask" presented through ViRcom linkages, was tall, trim, and fit in Imperial blacks resplendent with gold braid and decorations. Though he'd never met the liaison officer formally. Dev had seen him once in the flesh—at another of Kodama's parties, as a matter of fact. He knew that the real Tsuru was a corpulent slug of a man, only seventy-five centimeters tall and still massing at least 130 kilos.

  It was more pleasant to deal with his Al-generated analogue.

  "Konichiwa, hajimemashte." Dev said formally, bowing. He was guessing that Tsuru was on Singapore time, which was now mid-afternoon. Konichiwa was the appropriate polite greeting for any time between mid-morning and early evening. "Cameron des."

  "I know who you are. Devis Cameron." Tsuru's image replied, his Inglic fluent, precise, and curt. "Your orders have just come through."

  "Hai. Tsurusama." He used the very polite -sama honorific and bowed again. He tried to mask his excitement and his curiosity, both of which could be construed as bad manners. Besides, he could sense a hard edge, an undercurrent of trouble, perhaps, locked behind the bland and emotionless mask of the Liaison's analogue.

  "Operation Evening Calm has been approved," the image said bluntly. "You are to take charge of the field phase of the project, effective immediately."

  Dev's heart leaped. Wonderful!

  "Thank you, Tsurusama. But where, please—"

  "Eridu." The analogue's dark eyes regarded him without emotion. Information, meanwhile, unfolded in Dev's implanted RAM. Eridu, he noted, was Chi Draconis V, twenty-five light-years from Sol.

  "Thirty days ago," Tsuru continued, "several Xenophobes broke through to the surface near Winchester, the capital city. There has been fighting, and casualties. Until that time, the only activity noted on the planet was some minor seismic disturbances and a few cavern traces fifteen thousand kilometers from the nearest human colony. Eridu's governor has requested immediate Imperial support."

  Which meant military support. Damn! "But if fighting's already started . . ." Dev began, hesitant.

  "Your orders will explain everything," Tsuru said. "Stand by for direct RAM feed."

  Dev manipulated the necessary codes in his mind. Data flashed across the ViRcom interface, flowing from Tsuru's AI to the random-access memory of Dev's cerebral implant. He saw that it was marked gokuhi, "secret." and could be scanned only through the use of his personal authorization code.

  "Feed complete." Dev said. "Sir, I wonder if—"

  He stopped. The ViRcom interface had been broken from Tsuru's end, a cold and bluntly discourteous ending to the conversation that left Dev uneasy. Was the Imperial Liaison worried about link intercepts? The Imperial Staff and the Court at the Tenno Kyuden, the Palace of Heaven, itself had far more than their share of intrigue and politics. Was that what was behind Tsuru's curtness, a need for secrecy? Or something more?

  Hesitantly, he unfolded the electronic text orders in his mind.

  Yes! Yunagi had been okayed, its funding approved by the Colonial Affairs Council! He was being attached to the office of Eridu's Imperial Governor; he would report to Chiji Prem himself, though his immediate military supervisor would be a Hegemony Colonel. Emilio Duarte, of the 4th Terran Rangers. A fast courier, the Hayai, was being put at his disposal to get him to Eridu that much faster.

  He forgot Tsuru's manner, forgot the pain of Katya's leaving, as he thought about what this would mean for his career. He felt as though everything that had happened to him in these past few years would at last be given meaning.

  Man had been at war with the Xenophobes for forty-four years, ever since the first surfacing on the colony world of An Nur II in 2498. Only last year, however, with contact with the alien DalRiss, had he begun to learn just what it was that he faced.

  They were called Xenophobes because it was assumed they feared or hated all other life forms, an assumption that Dev had personally learned was not true. In fact, the Xenos were not even aware of other life forms; they reasoned in a curious black-white, yes-no world of Boolean logic and had trouble even perceiving the existence of creatures such as humans. They lived deep within the planetary crust, a kind of group mind, two-kilogram "cells" resembling black gobs of jelly linked together like the neurons of a human brain, but filling underground caverns that spanned hundreds, perhaps thousands, of kilometers.

  They absorbed rock—though they seemed to prefer the purer elements and components of human technology—to reproduce, and to hollow vast caverns for themselves in the depths, where they metabolized the heat of the planet's core. Their life cycle spanned worlds and eons. When a planetary crust was riddled with tunnels and enmeshed in the webwork of a single organism that called itself the "One" and that humans called the "World Mind," it hurled cell-colonies into the emptiness of the Great Void, protected in shells that rode the magnetic winds between the stars; after millennia, some few of those seed pods might be drawn to suitable worlds with the magnetic fields and core heat the Xenos found comfortable, there to begin all over. There was no communication between one Xenophobe world and the next.

  And perhaps strangest of all, their worldview was inverted from that of humans. They saw the universe as an infinity of rock, with the Great Void a hollow emptiness within.

  This much Dev had assimilated on the DalRiss homeworld when he'd encountered a Xenophobe One and touched it with the organic communicator called a comel on his arm. He'd learned that the One was extremely intelligent, though the nature of that intelligence might well be beyond human grasp. He'd learned that it responded to attack—perceived as the loss of some of its scattered parts—by striking back with technologies assimilated from other species on other worlds ages ago, and transferred from World Mind to World Mind
through the passages of each generation.

  And he'd learned that the Xenophobe World Mind of Alya B-V, say, had nothing to do with the Xenophobes infesting Loki . . . or Eridu. Each was distinct, sundered by light-years of distance and many thousands of years in time. The World Mind, the so-called "contemplative phase" that was no longer struggling to integrate itself throughout the planetary crust, did not even think of the earlier "acquisitive phase" as intelligent, though there was plenty of evidence to the contrary.

  All of which meant that Dev had not ended the war simply by talking with one contemplative-phase Xenophobe. For peace to be won, humans would have to seek out the Xenophobes of every world they'd infested and contact them independently.

  And that was precisely what Operation Yunagi was all about.

  Chapter 3

  The Xenophobe War is like no other conflict in Man's bloody history because, for the first time, his opponent is a complete unknown. In past wars, at least, the enemy was human, his science known, his reasons for fighting rational or at least intelligible, his worldview comprehensible. After four decades of war, however, the only motive we can ascribe to the Xenophobes is hatred or fear of other life forms—hence their name. Some researchers go so far as to suggest that their thought processes may be so alien to ours that we may never understand their reasoning.

  —The Xeno Foe

  HEMILCOM Military ViRdocumentary

  C.E. 2537

  The Imperial courier Hayai was waiting for Dev at Bay Three, Berth Seven, a stubby, thirty-meter lump of outsized power tap converters and receptor nacelles capped by a heavily shielded crew module smaller than some lifeboats Dev had seen. Captain Tokuyama, a small, wiry man with a clean-shaven scalp, greeted him at the docking tube.