by Ian Douglas
—Field Manual 19-15
"Civil Disturbances"
Department of the Army, 1985
"According to Intelligence." the briefing officer said, "we can expect another mass demonstration today, beginning at the Assyrian Concourse. We have been directed by HEMILCOM to initiate a period of martial law within Winchester and its environs, and we should anticipate the possibility of a hostile response from an aroused populace. All patrols will operate under Class Five ROEs."
A chorus of low-voiced murmurs echoed through the squad bay. Class Five rules of engagement called for the unit to arm and engage their weapons only if they were fired upon. Still, it was a step up from Class Six, which prohibited any use of weapons or lethal force under any circumstances. And martial law! That had been threatened for months now, but the reality had never materialized.
Things must be getting desperate.
Dev sat with the other striderjacks of A Company, 1st Battalion of the 4th Terran Rangers in an open space in the bay. Each morning briefing for the past month had been more of the same—"Expect mass demonstrations or civil disturbances"—but the pace of events seemed to be picking up. So far, there'd been remarkably few incidents between the local population and the Hegemony peacekeeping units stationed on Eridu, but the change in ROEs was almost a sure-fire guarantee that the situation was also going to change.
The staff briefing officer stepped away from the small wooden podium that had been erected in front of the ranks of folding chairs. Colonel Duarte took his place. "Thank you, Captain Ranescú." He paused for a moment, gripping the sides of the podium as he stared out over the faces of the assembled company.
They were in the capital city of Winchester, not far from Eridu's south pole. Company A currently mustered twenty light warstriders out of a usual complement of twenty-four, organized into two platoons of eight each, plus a command section. Present were the strider crews, along with key maintenance and armorer personnel, plus 115 men and women of Company D, one of the regiment's two close-support leg infantry units. Companies B and C were stationed in a neighboring city, while the 2nd and 3rd Battalions were posted halfway around the planet in Eridu's north boreal region.
"Okay, people," Duarte said. "You've heard the word. There are rumors in the city that there's been a major Xenophobe breakout just a few kilometers from here. The rumor is false, but the dissies are using this to stir up the mobs, convincing them that we're about to use the Imperial solution."
Dev whistled softly to himself. "The Imperial solution" was a military euphemism for ground-penetrating nuclear warheads. By Charter law, only Imperial forces could deploy nuclear warheads. "Dissies" were dissidents, the anti-Hegemony or anti-Imperial factions who had been stirring up trouble on Eridu for nearly a year.
If Dev had learned anything during the two months he'd spent on Eridu, it was that the locals—the vocal minority involved in the demonstrations, at any rate—were fanatically opposed to the use of nuclear weapons of any kind on their world.
How did the majority feel about it? Dev wasn't sure. There were several pro-Hegemony groups on the planet that supported Imperial intervention, but their voices tended to be lost in massed freedom-for-Eridu chants. Most Eriduans. Dev suspected, wanted nothing more than for the noisy people, pros and antis alike, to go away and leave them to get on with their lives. After six months of demonstrations, strikes, and protests, Eridu's economy was in chaos.
"Our mission until now," Duarte continued, "was simply to keep the peace. Today, however, we have been directed by Hegemony Military Command to disperse the mob and declare martial law.
"HEMILCOM does not believe there will be armed resistance to the order. Nevertheless, we have been directed to use every precaution. We will return fire only if fired upon, but we will maintain a highly visible presence within the city until the Governor's office has time to restore calm through political means. Warstriders will at all times avoid the use of unnecessary force. Company C squad commanders, you will see to it that your troops are issued with Iijima-44 sonic stunners in addition to their regular combat gear. Our call sign will be Blue Lancer. Are there questions?"
Dev wanted to ask about events elsewhere on Eridu. The 4th Terran Rangers were one of just two Guard Regiments stationed on Eridu: the other was the 3rd New American Mechanized Cavalry, which, like the Rangers, had units scattered across the planet. What was happening with the two companies of the 4th stationed at Memphis and Chaldee, just a few hundred kilometers from Winchester? Or at the towerdown outpost of Babel, or at the equatorial plantations? Was there rioting out there as well, or was the trouble just here in Winchester? There'd been no news for weeks, ever since Governor Prem had ordered total censorship of all media broadcasts and news linkfeeds.
Damn, Dev thought, you'd think that someone would tell the people tasked with trying to keep a lid on things.
He held his questions. He'd already heard the current who-was on the matter. Dev's most reliable sources insisted that there'd been riots in most of the cities on Eridu where Guard military units were stationed. Tensions had been mounting for two months, ever since a sniper had killed a couple of off-duty Rangers at a sidewalk restaurant in Memphis.
Dev leaned far back in his chair, arms folded. And still the promised comel had not arrived from Earth! He'd decided that Omigato, or someone, had blocked the comel's shipment, or intercepted it, for reasons of his own. He'd queried Earth twice in six weeks, though it was impossible to tell if his courier messages were even getting through until he got a reply: there was nothing more that could be done until the bureaucratic tangle—or sabotage—sorted itself out.
Meanwhile, he was stuck on Eridu, with his TAD to the 4th Rangers dragging relentlessly toward a permanent transfer. The local mincies—the word was derived from minshu, a Nihongo word for "civilians"—had long ago replaced the Xenos as Dev's primary concern. He rarely even thought about Operation Yunagi anymore, so caught up had he become with the day-to-day routine of life in a Guard warstrider regiment.
He was still in an uncomfortable, lame-duck position with the Rangers, though, for he was senior to all of the line officers in A Company except for Captain Siegfried Koch . . . and Koch had been reassigned to HEMILCOM headquarters in Babylon three weeks earlier. Duarte himself had taken command of until the bronze-bearded Koch returned. Technically. Dev was on Duarte's staff as part of his command section; in fact, he was a third leg who helped with the administrative work when he could, helped with the planning and organization of the battalion's two legger companies, and otherwise tried to stay out of the way.
Dev continued to listen as other members of the unit asked questions about deployment and parts availability. Duarte answered them, asked if there were more, then stepped from behind the podium. "Okay, striderjacks. Mount up and plug in! Let's impress hell out of the mincies!"
With a clatter and scraping of folding chairs, they rose and dispersed, the striderjacks heading across the steel grate floor toward their waiting machines, the leggers queuing up in front of the stores arsenal to be issued their lasers and sonic stunners.
The company's warstriders lined both sides of the vast interior space of the squad bay, silently waiting giants of durasheath armor, steel-gray surfaces, and menacing weapons. Dev broke into a trot, angling across the floor toward his strider, which stood quiescent, partly obscured in the tangled embrace of a maintenance access gantry. It was a single-slotter, an RLN-90 Scoutstrider similar to the machine he'd jacked during the Alya campaign.
Standing three and a half meters tall, the light recon strider massed nearly twenty tons. The Scoutstrider was among the most strikingly anthropomorphic of warstrider designs, most of which tended to look vaguely like aircraft or cannon shells slung between massive, back-angled legs. RLN-90s had a rather stubby, squared-off upper torso section rotating freely above the lower chassis and leg assemblies; the right arm could mount either a 100-megawatt laser or a high-speed autocannon, while the left arm sported a massive four-
fingered hand. Kv-48 weapons packs on each armored "shoulder," mounting rockets, grenades, and machine guns completed the strider's primary armament. Almost as an afterthought, an M-90 Chemflamer had been strapped to the left forearm, a field modification made necessary by the chance of combat with Xenos. The strider's hull nanoflage hadn't been charged yet, so the machine's overall color was still a dark and lusterless gray.
Dev's eyes strayed to the Inglic letters picked out in white paint high up on the torso's armored carapace. Some wag in the company's maintenance team had painted the word Koman-do there, and Dev had accepted the bilingual pun with good humor. The phrase translated as "the way of the advisor," but it put him in mind of his old Cameron's Commandos. His Scoutstrider's name was a kind of memorial to those men and women who'd fought with him, first on Loki, then on the worlds of a star system over one hundred light-years from home.
He wondered how the Thorhammers were getting on now without him.
One question led smoothly to the next. Where was Katya now, and what was she doing?
"Everything set, Gun?" he asked the squat man with silicarb-blackened hands and arms standing before the strider. Gunso Gio Olivetti—his rank corresponded to that of sergeant—was crew chief of Dev's Scoutstrider.
"All set, Lieutenant," he said, wiping his hands with a dirty rag. "Your C-90 tanks are dry, but you shouldn't be needing them. Your '48s are loaded with DY-20s and 30s only. No rockets, no MGs."
"Fine." Facing a civilian mob, there'd be no need for flamer, rockets, or machine guns. DY-20s were tube-launched grenades that detonated with a dazzling flash and an earsplitting noise. DY-30s were gas grenades. Depending on the type, and he would be loaded with a variety, they could blind, stun, or panic a crowd, and were generally used for riot control. With a last look around the cavernous squad bay. Dev started up the gantry ladder, climbing three meters to the accessway.
The narrow, circular pod hatch was already open. Careful not to snag his military bodysuit, Dev squeezed feet-first through the opening, snuggling down into a horizontal tube somewhat more cramped than a coffin.
His VCH—the vehicle cephlinkage helmet—was hanging in a recessed nook above his head. Carefully, he snapped the interior jacks home in all three of his sockets, then pulled the helmet down over his head. Other fittings, tubes and cables, plugged into connectors in his bodysuit. While he was jacking the strider, the machine's AI would watch over his physical body, keeping it clean and healthy while his brain was otherwise engaged. Connections secure, he snapped the couch harness into place, then brought his left palm down on the interface built into the console at his side.
With a dazzling inner flash of light, Dev's claustrophobic surroundings vanished. He was standing again in the open squad bay, the framework of the gantry pressed close about his torso. Olivetti stood below him, his head barely at the level of Dev's hips. Again, Dev felt the surge of power, the thrill of majesty and irresistible strength that accompanied the cephlinkage of Man and Warstrider.
Through that link. Dev was not the combat vehicle's pilot; he was the Scoutstrider, and he could feel the texture of the waffle-molded steel deck beneath his flanged feet, could sense the air temperature and noted automatically that it hovered at close to thirty degrees Celsius. Alphanumerics cascaded across his vision, indicating power levels, systems status, and weapons readiness. Below him. Olivetti touched a control and the gantry folded back out of the way. Dev gestured, effortlessly raising the one-ton mass of his left arm in a casual salute. His crew chief returned the gesture, then moved back out of the way as Dev took his first step forward.
"Okay, Blue Lancers," Duarte's voice said over the tactical link, sharp within Dev's mind. "We'll take it in open deployment. No straggling."
Duarte's command strider was twenty meters ahead, just inside the high, trapezoidal opening of the squad bay door. His LaG-42 Ghostrider was more typical of warstrider design, over four meters tall and massing better than twenty-five tons, a blunt, cylindrical fuselage slung between heavy legs with digitigrade articulation, like a bird's. A 100-megawatt laser paired with a chemical flamer jutted from a chin turret beneath the blunt prow. Instead of arms, it mounted Kv-70 weapons packs, larger versions of Dev's Kv-48s, though external waldo manipulators could be plugged in at need. The Ghostrider was a double-slotter, with two jackers lying beneath the long, paired blisters on the hull's dorsal surface. Duarte's number two was an experienced chu-i named Charles Muirden.
Duarte's Ghostrider bore one touch unusual for a modern combat vehicle. Rising from its back between the weapons pods was a slender telescoping mast with a crosspiece mounted at the top. Hanging from the crosspiece was a Hegemony banner, the blue-and-white globe of Earth displayed against a gold-bordered field of green. Such banners seemed like an affectation from another age, harking back to some medieval era of military regalia, but at times they could play an important psywar role. It was vital that the citizens in Winchester's streets who saw the advancing warstrider platoon know that it was the Hegemony Guard that they faced.
Dev fell into line with the other warstriders, two rows of ten facing the door. To the rear, the legger troops were filing into their waiting hover APCs. Slowly, the huge doors began sliding aside, opening onto the interior of the city of Winchester.
Eridu's capital was not the largest city on the planet, but it was one of the oldest, dating back to the very first colonial outposts in 2312. The city's main dome was over two kilometers across and housed a warren of older structures, pressurized domes and habs, industrial facilities, and warehouses. The Rangers' squad bay was part of a smaller, adjoining dome on the east side of the city called the Armory, which served as barracks and training center for A and D Companies. The Armory opened directly into the main dome, where Tarleton Avenue ran straight to City Center and the Assyrian Concourse at the commercial and government heart of the city.
The Concourse was a broad, open park surrounded by modern buildings, with Government House brooding over the north end, the older Workers' Guild Hall at the south. The dome overhead was transplas. Angling his optics toward the city's roof, Dev could tell it was raining outside. Water was streaming down the dome's curved surface in rippling sheets.
"Keep it tight." Duarte's voice said. "Close it up. Set nanoflage for display. Show the colors!"
In Hegemony practice, the thin layer of programmed nano coating each strider normally was set to reflect surrounding colors, while deleting bright flashes of light or quick movement, creating a kind of camouflage that was extraordinarily effective at ranges of a hundred meters or so. Within the close confines of city streets, such camouflage would be of little use. Besides, the point of this exercise was to be seen. Each warstrider in the column shimmered, then flashed to a deep, brilliant blue, with white trim at each set of joints.
Blue and white—the colors of Earth, and of the Hegemony.
Dev was right behind Duarte's Ghostrider, walking alongside a smaller LaG-17 Fastrider jacked by an Eriduan sho-i named Beverly Schneider. The double line moved swiftly through nearly empty streets. Ground transport in Eridu's cities tended to be floaters levitated by magnetic rails embedded in the pavement, and the streets could be crowded at times, but the area seemed almost eerily deserted. The few civilian pedestrians out ducked for cover into the surrounding buildings as the warstrider company trooped by.
"Hey. Chu-i Cameron?" a voice said over a private channel. Dev recognized it as a young sho-i, new to the unit. Martin Koenig. Like Schneider, he'd been recruited here on Eridu, rather than on Earth where the Rangers had been organized.
"What is it, Koenig?"
"Just wondering if you'd heard the latest who-was, Lieutenant," Koenig said. "They say that all these demonstrations and strikes and stuff are being caused somehow by the Xenophobes, maybe Xenos that're somehow taking people over. They say they're trying to weaken Eridu before they launch their big attack."
"You've been simming too many ViRdrama thrillers, Koenig," Dev replied dryly. "Xenos do
n't understand human politics. Hell, they don't understand humans."
The Xeno World Mind he'd communicated with on Alya B-V had barely been able to comprehend that humans were sentient non-Xenos. To their way of thinking, the terms sentient and not-Self taken together were an oxymoron, an alien and virtually incomprehensible concept. The Xenos loose inside Eridu's planetary crust almost certainly shared that same bias. The idea of Xenophobes lurking in their deep caverns and tunnels and somehow subverting human groups and organizations on the surface struck Dev as ludicrous.
"I don't know about that. Lieutenant," Koenig replied. "There's this guy I know in Memphis who—"
"Koenig," Dev interrupted, "I've been there, okay? We're not facing Xenophobe agents masquerading as humans, and we're not up against a Xeno secret weapon."
"Lieutenant Cameron's right," Duarte's voice cut in. "We're facing scared, misguided humans this time, not monsters, and that's the straight hont. Are you linked on that?"
"Yes, sir," Koenig said. He sounded hurt. "Linked."
"Let's keep the chatter down, then, and stay alert. We've got something happening up ahead."
The demonstration, Dev saw, had already begun. Perhaps the reason the city streets seemed deserted was the fact that most of Winchester's population appeared to be crowded into the park at the Assyrian Concourse. They were facing the Guild Hall, where speakers were addressing the crowd from a broad, open balcony. Dev engaged his telephoto optics, letting his vision zoom in on individuals within the crowd. DOWN WITH THE HEGEMONY and ERIDU IS OURS were two popular banners, though dozens of others hung in the air above the mob, bobbing up and down with the chants that punctuated the speakers' deliveries.