Warstrider: All Six Novels and An Original Novella

by Ian Douglas

  "Konichiwa," Tokuyama said, extending a reader for Dev's palm interface. He wore rather shabby green coveralls bearing, not military insignia, but the patch of the Sekkodan, the Imperial Scout Service. He shifted easily to Inglic. "You must be my special cargo."

  Dev pressed his hand to the reader, transferring identity data and the relevant part of his orders to Hayai's artificial intelligence. "I guess so. I'm afraid I still don't know why the rush. I thought they would send me out on a starliner, or at least aboard a regular military transport."

  Tokuyama grinned mirthlessly. "And when you get to Eridu they'll keep you waiting until the next starliner catches up with you, and you find you could have made the trip in comfort after all. I know the routine well, O-nimotsusan."

  Dev chuckled and gave the captain a wry bow. Nimotsu was Nihongo for "baggage," and even with the polite construction and the suffix meaning "honorable" it was an unflattering but accurate assessment of Dev's status aboard the courier.

  Eridu was the fifth world of Chi Draconis, an F7 star twenty-five and a quarter light-years from Sol. Typical passage time for a Tsukai-class fast courier would be anywhere from twelve to sixteen days, depending on the skill of its five-man crew.

  Unfortunately, the Artificial Intelligences aboard fast couriers rarely had much in the way of simulated diversions for passengers. Most of their capacity was reserved for navlinks with the ship's helmsmen, and there was little to spare for "honorable baggage." Two weeks for the K-T portion of the voyage, plus time for in-system maneuvering; no matter how he looked at it. Dev was in for an extended period of mind-numbing boredom.

  Dev wished he'd had time to pick up some long-run ViRdramas at some Singapore Orbital shop. He did get permission from Tokuyama to access the ship's ephemeris. Memorizing data on Chi Draconis V might not only be useful at his destination, it would help pass the time and let him emerge at the other end still sane.

  Four hours after he'd boarded the Hayai, Dev was outbound from Earth at a steady three-G boost. Swaddled in a bodysuit and hooked into mechanisms that kept his physical self fed, hydrated, and clean; sealed inside a tank of heavy fluid that helped ease the strain of constant high-G acceleration; Dev began marking the time as best as he was able, immersing himself in research.

  He went carefully through his orders again first, of course. From a close reading, it was evident that Yunagi had been approved by a relatively small majority on the staff. He'd expected that, after the trouble he'd had winning some of them over to his side. Many simply didn't believe meaningful communication with the Xenophobes was possible at all. Others were politically motivated. Gensui Munimori, he knew, and a number of others, were openly hostile to gaijin, preferring only Japanese to work on potentially high-prestige projects like this one.

  Operation Yunagi was, of itself, fairly straightforward. A number of DalRiss comels, budded from the comel that he'd used to talk to the Xeno World Mind on Alya B-V, had been prepared in laboratories on Earth. When Xenophobes were discovered on another human-colonized world, the comels would be shipped there.

  Ideally, the attempt to communicate should have been tried before humans and Xenophobes clashed on the target world; according to Tsuru, it was too late for that on Eridu, and that aspect of the plan may have been unrealistic to begin with. It was hard to keep colonists from shooting at something that persisted in snacking on city domes, power plants, or warstriders. In fact—Dev's arguments before the Imperial Staff had stressed the point—it might only be possible to approach Xenos on a world where active fighting had already broken out, simply because there was no way to get at the ones that were still kilometers underground.

  Perhaps the biggest unanswered question was whether or not he could even get close to an acquisitive-stage Xeno without being killed.

  That was a question which could not be answered until he tried.

  Dev didn't like looking at that aspect of Yunagi too closely, though he'd watched enough Xenos to be pretty sure he'd be able to at least approach the things, once he found some on the surface. He filed that for later, and tapped into Hayai's ephemeris.

  Linkcode accepted. Datafeed commence—

  Stellar Data: Chi Draconis

  Type F7 V, mass 1.25 Sol, luminosity 3.0 Sol, stellar radius 1.13 Sol.

  Planetary system: six major bodies, including one Earthlike world (V) located within the star's habitable zone. . . .

  Planetary Data: Chi Draconis V (Eridu)

  Mean orbital radius: 1.78 a.u., eccentricity: .00513, period: 2.124y; natural satellites: two.

  Diameter: 11.244 km, mass: 4.1 x 1027g, density: 5.501 g/cm3, surface gravity: .879 G: rotational period: 32h 15m 24.119s, axial tilt: 01° 13 ' 28 ": magnetic field: .47 gauss. . . .

  Albedo: .58: temperature range (equatorial): 40°C to 50°C: Atmospheric pressure (sea level): .81 bar: composition: N2 87.1%. O2 9.5%, Ar1.2%, H2O (mean) 2.1%. CO2 845 ppm, SO2 2.7 ppm, O3 0.515 ppm. . . .

  Note: Due to low partial pressures of atmospheric oxygen, plus somewhat elevated carbon dioxide and ozone levels, the atmosphere of Chi Draconis V is not breathable by humans without artificial assistance. Plans to modify the planetary atmosphere for human needs have met with surprisingly widespread local resistance. . . .

  For hours, Dev walked the ViRsim surface of Eridu, getting a feel for the world and its terrain, his cephlink persona unaffected by the thin and oxygen-starved air.

  Hot and wet were the words best characterizing Eridu. Popular sims and travelogue feeds described the place as a jungle world, though such a simplistic characterization of any planetary ecology was patent nonsense. The air was humid, and at the equator where temperatures hovered around fifty degrees Celsius, steaming, brackish swamps and continent-wide tangles of exotic native flora reminiscent of Earth's long-lost jungles were the rule.

  The climate at Eridu's iceless poles, however, was equivalent to that of northern BosWash, say, or the Pacific Northwest. An almost nonexistent axial tilt eliminated seasonal variations; climate was determined entirely by latitude and altitude, not by winter or summer. North and south of fifty degrees, the gently rolling hills were blanketed in open woodlands or steppelike grasslands. Winchester, near the planet's southern pole, was one of the largest of Eridu's colonial settlements. Unlike on other colony worlds, where an equatorial towerdown had become the planet's principal city, Eridu's towerdown at Babel was little more than a stopover for freight and passengers going up- or down-tower. Transport to the more pleasant climes of the poles was accomplished by rail magflitter or by hydrofoil. Perhaps half of the world's surface area was given over to small landlocked seas: more of Eridu's original allotment of primordial water had escaped to space early in its history than had been the case on Earth, beneath a milder, gentler sun.

  There'd been quite a lot of political controversy over Eridu, Dev noted. Universal Life was active there, as were several modern offshoots of the old Green Party political activists. In Winchester, he watched a demonstration by anti-Hegemonists, a chanting mob of dissidents advancing through the city's main dome. A thin line of Authority Police blocked their way with stunners and light laser weapons.

  "Troublemakers," Tokuyama's voice said, seemingly at his side. Dev opened a RAM code extending a silent invitation for Hayai's Captain to join him. Tokuyama's ViRpersona, Dev noticed, was identical to his real-world self, right down to the grease-stained and shabby green coveralls. "Hooligans and troublemakers."

  "What's the argument all about?" Dev asked. "Whether or not it's ethical to terraform?"

  "Eridu'd be easy to T-form," Tokuyama said. "Double the partial pressure of oxygen. Lower the CO2. You could manage that in fifteen years with a single atmosphere converter. That'd make the air breathable for humans and have the added benefit of reducing the greenhouse effect enough to make the equatorial regions bearable. A cinch compared to some hellhole like Moloch or Loki, neh?"

  "It would also exterminate the local flora and fauna," Dev noted. With an effort of will, he shifted his
vantage point from the city square to a point outside, where a forest of odd, mushroom-shaped things that might have been trees, stained in shades of red, gold, and brown, crowded close together above orange-tinted things that looked like dry-land sea anemones. Something fluttered through the air, all gauze and crimson streamers, but Dev couldn't see it well enough to tell what it was. "Double the oxygen and you'd poison the natives. Their metabolisms are geared for nine percent oxygen and thinner air."

  "So? It's our planet now. Hell, some people say we didn't have the right to T-form prebiotics like Loki or Hephaestus, but we do. Better'n letting them go to waste, right?" He shook his head in disgust. "Some people are baka. Fools. They don't know when they have it good."

  Dev didn't answer, but Tokuyama's curt dismissal bothered him. He was no enviro or greenie, certainly, but the Hegemony had taken a lot of public relations flak over the years for its rape-and-plunder colonial policies. There'd be less talk about rebellion on the Frontier, he thought, if some of those centuries-old policies could be softened.

  Besides, according to the entry in Hayai's ephemeris, Eridu's ecology already provided several important trade products. A fungus from the humid equatorial forests, for example, provided a drug useful for biological memory enhancement, while a chemical extract taken from a freshwater weed called grennel was reputed to improve sexual performance.

  "Any rebel activity on Eridu?" he asked Tokuyama.

  "Oh, the usual who-was," the Captain said. Who-was, an Inglic corruption of the Nihongo uwasa, was slang for "rumors" or "hearsay." Tokuyama was as earthy and as colloquially direct as most Americans Dev knew.

  "Like what?"

  "Nothing official. The greenies keep threatening to start an armed rebellion if the Hegemony starts T-forming. Eridu was colonized by Americans, though. Americans and Europeans. That makes it a breeding ground for weird anti-Imperial notions, neh?"

  Dev wondered whether Tokuyama was trying to get a rise out of him, or if he'd genuinely forgotten that his passenger was an American. After a moment's thought, he decided that his being an Imperial officer was all that counted for the old scout captain. He would relate to Dev as he would to any other Japanese official.

  As for dissident activity at Eridu, well, it wouldn't affect his mission there. The sudden emergence of Xenophobes suggested that even anti-Imperial rebels would be keeping their heads down for the time being. Travis Sinclair and his New Constitutionalists might hate the Hegemony and everything about it, but even they couldn't prefer Xenos to their fellow humans. Humans you could talk to, negotiate with. Eventually you could reach an understanding with them. Xenophobes were so alien it was difficult to know what they were thinking . . . or even whether or not they were capable of thought at all.

  As he continued experiencing the sims recorded on Eridu, however, Dev couldn't help wondering about the factions that seemed poised for battle, ready to duel for control of Eridu's destiny. He felt a certain sympathy for the people fighting to preserve the planet's natural order, if for no other reason than that mass extinction within the planetary biosphere would ruin the livelihoods of tens of thousands of colonists. Until an Earth-based ecology could be established, there would be mass dislocation, poverty, even famine if the local government failed to address the colonists' needs.

  On the other hand, surely the Hegemony had the best interests of the people at heart. Worlds where men could walk without E-suits and breathe the air unaided, like New Earth or Elysia or Earth herself, were achingly rare. Terraforming created such worlds, given the proper raw materials and a few centuries in which to work.

  Most T-formed worlds in the Shichiju had begun as prebiotic planets, worlds of water and ammonia and carbon dioxide that had the potential for evolving life but had never done so. One theory held that they would never do so; the Lunar Hypothesis suggested that only on worlds with large, close, natural satellites could prebiotic chemicals form the complex chains of amino acids, proteins, and ultimately DNA analogues. Tides, the proponents of the Lunar Hypothesis argued, tides such as those on Earth or Elysia, were necessary for the appearance of life. If humans didn't terraform such worlds, they would forever remain lifeless, poison-shrouded wastes.

  On Eridu, the situation was a bit more complicated, but different only in degree, not in principle. There, life had formed some hundreds of millions of years ago, but the most advanced phyla were insectlike pollinators of the plant life that girdled the planet from pole to pole. Most animal life remained in Eridu's shallow seas, a recapitulation of Earth some three hundred fifty million years earlier. Intelligence, if it was to evolve at all, could not possibly arise on such worlds for many tens of millions of years yet to come.

  The environmentalists, then, were interested in preserving primitive local life forms, creatures of particular interest to the exobiologists, of course, and to the locals who harvested grennel or trekked through the jungle searching for patches of Dracomycetes mirabila. But a world open to full habitation and exploitation would benefit everyone.

  Surely, Dev thought, new careers could be found for out-of-work grennel harvesters, for example, and modern medical nanotechnology promised that any chemical compound could be perfectly and cheaply synthesized. It wasn't as though Mankind was losing anything by terraforming such a world. He was gaining an entire planet, one with blue skies and breathable air, and the chance for launching new art, new achievements, a whole new expression of the diversity and the inventiveness of Man.

  Besides, a scattering of local rebels and malcontents would be no match for the Hegemony Guard. They must see that their cause was hopeless.

  Why then did they persist? Dev returned to the ship's simulation of Eridu many times, walking invisibly with the protestors, listening to their shouted curses and slogans. "Don't poison our world!" What was that supposed to mean? "Leave us alone!" and "Down with the Imperial Hegemony!" and "Chiji no! Life yes!"

  Didn't the chanting, angry citizens know that they'd not survive on a hostile world like Eridu for six weeks without the Hegemony? They might grow food enough for themselves in the orbital hydroponics farms, but machine parts, tools, replacements, AI computers, weapons, all of those came from Earth or the other developed worlds of the Core.

  To Dev, it seemed that the whole colony was on the verge of going mad.

  Still, the disturbances appeared to be caused by a relative handful of extremists. Simwalking the demonstrations and riots, it was easy to forget that the vast majority of a world's citizens were law-abiding, wanting nothing more than to be left alone. It was those people who would suffer most if civil war broke out . . . or if the Xeno threat wasn't contained.

  Dev refused to think about it anymore. The governor and his guard would have to look after the threat of rebellion. Dev's concern was for the Xenos and how he was going to carry out his orders, especially if the fighting between Xenos and humans on Eridu had already begun. That situation was more than enough headache for any one man.

  Any rebellion on Eridu could look after itself.

  Chapter 4

  Travis Ewell Sinclair—soldier, politician, author, statesman, philosopher . . . and principal author of that remarkable document called The Declaration of Reason, if the Confederation Rebellion doesn't owe its existence to this man, it at least owes him much of its character.

  —Rebellion

  ViRsim documentary

  Richard Fitzgerald Kent

  C.E. 2542

  It had been years since Katya had been on New America, and she wasn't entirely sure how she should feel about her homecoming. What she actually felt was . . . numb. She had no family here to speak of any longer, and her memories of growing up on a farm in the Ukrainian colony were not good ones.

  The world was as she remembered it, though—wild, rugged, and beautiful. New America was one of the handful of worlds in the Shichiju that had evolved an ecology of its own before men from Earth had come . . . and it was one of the even smaller number of worlds where the organic chemistries w
ere sufficiently like those on Earth—right down to left-handed amino acids and right-handed sugars—that many native foods could be eaten by humans. A garden world, unspoiled and beautiful, at least so far.

  Perhaps the world's single disadvantage from a commercial viewpoint was its lack of a space elevator: New America possessed a single large, close moon, Columbia, whose pale and ruggedly cratered face loomed huge in the sky even in daylight, and whose tidal pull was so strong that no sky-el would have stood for long without becoming dangerously unstable.

  But for Katya, that had always been one of the place's few charms. No sky-el meant no cheap surface-to-orbit transport, and that meant little Imperial or Hegemony interference on a world where shipping costs were high. It made for a precarious planetary economy, but the Hegemony government stayed more or less off the people's backs.

  Inevitably, perhaps, that and the fact that two thirds of its population were descendants of American colonists, had made it notorious as a breeding ground for dissident groups, strange philosophies and religions, and would-be rebels.

  Katya's liner, the Transluxus, had docked at the New American Orbital, a space station in low planetary orbit. She'd ViRcommed ahead from the station, then transferred to a civilian ascraft shuttle for the descent to Jefferson Spaceport. They were waiting for her when she walked through the arrivals gate.

  "Katya! Good to see you!"

  "Hey, how was Earth?"

  "Where's Dev? Is he coming?"

  "Welcome home, by God!"

  The Thorhammers had returned to Loki after the Alyan expedition, but with the Xenophobe threat gone from that world, the Hegemony had announced that it would be cutting back on the size of its Lokan garrison, and that veterans of the expedition could take early outs if they wanted.

  Many had, including most of the striderjacks of A Company, 1st Battalion. Alessandro's Assassins. Significantly, many of the unit's Lokan warriors had ended their hitches as well, investing their mustering-out pay in passages to New America.