by Ian Douglas
"I still don't understand," Katya said. "Nukes worked against the Xenos on Loki. What's the problem here?"
"The Imperials' biggest worry on Eridu isn't the cities so much as it is the little outlying communities, the places where the Heggers can't maintain control." Sinclair's eyes flicked to Creighton, who was sitting at the table with his hands folded before him. "Places like where Vince's wife is hiding. The nuclear option gives them the excuse they need to eliminate that problem. They'll call for all the outlying plantations and towns to be shut down . . . 'for the duration of the emergency.' The populations will be transferred to camps 'for their own safety' and interned in some sort of protective area."
"How do you know this?" Hagan asked.
"We've seen the plans." Simone said.
"And Simone should know," Creighton added. "This is the lady who hacked them from HEMILCOM's Babylon AI files." He shook his head slowly. "If they pull this off, we'll never be free of 'em. It'll be rules and regulations, 'Where's your internal passport?' and 'Let me see your link ID.' "
"Do any of you know what it's like in the big metroplexes on Earth?" Sinclair asked.
Katya nodded. "Dev—Lieutenant Cameron—was from BosWash," she said. "He told me about them."
"Then you know about the system that feeds and houses the majority of Terra's population." He sighed. "Sometimes I think that the government wants nothing more than to reduce the entire human race to fukushi. Put every man, woman, and child on social welfare. Take care of all their needs. Give them free implants so they can work and pay taxes and stay happily linked to their sims. Feed them, educate them, entertain them. Number them, watch them, tax them, control them."
"I guess the control part follows, huh?" Bondevik asked. "If the population depends on you for everything—for food, security, whatever—then you've got them right where you want them."
"Government thrives by growing at the individual's expense," Sinclair said. "Unless it's pruned back from time to time, the state's power only grows. That's what the New Constitutionalists are all about. We're gardeners."
"Unfortunately, many people prefer the security offered by the state," Lee Chung said. "They don't want . . . pruning."
"We have no argument with those billions on Earth happily vegetating in their metroplex towers," Sinclair said. He was speaking quickly now, the anger sharp in his words. "We do object to the Hegemony telling us how to run our lives, harassing our citizens, demanding ever bigger bites of our lives, of our souls. No government as ponderous as the Hegemony can speak on behalf of all of the citizens living in one small nation or colony. To try to force one government on every citizen on seventy-eight worlds is absurd, a monstrous exercise in applied megalomania. What does some bureaucrat in Singapore Orbital know about me living out on New America, about how I live, about what I think of ViRdrama sex or the Imperial cult or how I want my kids educated? Damn it, he can't know, and he has no business putting his nose in my affairs."
His vehemence surprised Katya. Sinclair's reputation was that of a philosopher—quiet, studied, rational, perhaps a little on the eccentric side. But he was visibly furious now.
"You're still going to have a hell of a time getting most people to understand that," Lee said. "Or getting them to care."
"Fortunately," Sinclair said, "revolutions don't involve most people. At least, not at the beginning. . . ."
Later, Katya and the others were taken on a tour of the underground facilities, and they met some of the people living there. Katya was frankly astonished at the range of people joined together under the rather all-inclusive banner of the Eriduan Network.
On Eridu, the environmentalist movement had been the catalyst for rebellion, but there were as many different approaches and agendas to what they perceived as Eridu's problems as there were groups advocating them. Over a year before, the Hegemony had first announced the plan to terraform Eridu, promising a world of abundance where breathing masks wouldn't be needed for out-of-doors, where homesteaders could live where they wanted without being forced to huddle together in transplas domes. The plan had generated a bewildering melee of envie and dissie factions.
One group, the Scientific Rationalists, suggested that studies be undertaken to find a means of helping the Eriduan ecology adapt to changing conditions, genetic nangineering on a planetary scale. Several offshoots of the old Green Party held that Man had no moral right to interfere with an alien ecology simply because it was different. Universal Life held that view and added that even tampering with prebiotic worlds like Loki was robbing whole worlds of their evolutionary destinies. They suggested that Man should restrict himself to totally dead worlds with the heat, gravity, and water appropriate to human settlement—rare—or to planets like New America that were more or less compatible to Terran biochemistry—rarer still. Perhaps most extreme were the Weberites, named for their founder, who advocated a wholesale return to Earth, with the Imperium footing the bill. Man had never been meant, they insisted, to spread beyond the boundaries of the perfect blue world created by God for Man.
The environmentalists might have started the dissident movement on Eridu, but the issue had grown far beyond environmentalist concerns. Fungus prospectors and grennel harvesters feared that there would be no more work with the wholesale extinction of Eriduan life. Antimonopolist activists pointed out that terraforming Eridu would grant more power to Japanese space-based industries, which disliked competition from nonsynthesized raw materials imported from worlds like Eridu and New America. Anti-Hegemonists feared greater control over private lives, while every Eriduan colonist feared the higher taxes that would be levied to pay for planetary engineering. Large segments of the populations at Eridu's north and south poles pointed out that a reduction of planetary temperatures might well bring on extensive glaciation, even an ice age, and force the migration of most of the population to warmer, ice-free zones. A few doomsayers pointed out that glaciation would lockup all of Eridu's limited surface water and divide the planet between ice caps and barren desert.
"It's amazing that so many different factions have found a home with you," Katya told Sinclair. They were walking along one of the Babel Underground's tunnels. "You can't possibly keep all of them happy."
"We're not in the business of making people 'happy' with us. Katya. It just happens that, no matter what their background, all of these groups see the same problem—the government. The Confederation doesn't promise to make things better, but it does promise to let them have a crack at fixing what they think is broke. Ah! Listen!"
They stopped in the passageway, and Katya could hear music. Sinclair gestured toward an open door farther along the passageway and she stepped through, entering a large circular room that had been made over into a lounge.
Perhaps thirty men and women were gathered there, most of them young. They sat in a circle around a woman with somewhat Amerind features, straight black hair, blue eyes, and a red headband. She was sitting cross-legged on the floor and she was playing a mentar, its curved sounding board resting in her lap as her hand caressed the slick black glossiness of an implant 'face. Music danced and wavered in the air, weaving chords and rhythms called from the woman's mind through her link with the instrument.
Those in the room seemed linked as well, though not physically. Their voices blended with the mentar's as they sang along. Katya recognized the tune at once, an old, old folk song she'd known on New America and not heard for years.
Worlds grow old and suns grow cold
And death we never can doubt.
Time's cold wind, wailing down the pass.
Reminds us that all flesh is grass
And history's lamps blow out.
But the Eagle has landed. Tell your children when.
Time won't drive us down to dust again.
"It's called 'Hope Eyrie,' " Sinclair murmured during the bridge between verses. "Know it?"
Katya nodded, listening.
Cycles turn while the far stars burn.
&nb
sp; And people and planets age.
Life's crown passes to younger lands.
Time brushes dust of hope from his hands
And turns another page.
But the Eagle has landed. Tell your children when.
Time won't drive us down to dust again.
But we who feel the weight of the wheel
When winter falls over our world
Can hope for tomorrow and raise our eyes
To a silver moon in the opened skies
And a single flag unfurled.
For the Eagle has landed. Tell your children when.
Time won't drive us down to dust again.
The people in the room singing along or listening seemed totally caught up in the music. Katya saw several faces, men's and women's alike, with wet eyes. Chung was in the group, she noticed, nodding with the beat, and Hagan too, a far-off smile on his lips.
One of the handful of popular folk classics surviving since the earliest days of space exploration, "Hope Eyrie" was popular on New America, where something like sixty percent of the population was descended from American colonists. In haunting, minor chords it recalled both the glory of Apollo and the bitterness of lost opportunity.
Irrationally, the song tugged at old memories, making her almost homesick. Her Ukrainian mother, years before, had told her a story about "Hope Eyrie," how translated first into Russian, then into Polish, it had become an underground song for Solidarnosc, a revolutionary underground in late twentieth-century Europe very much like the Network. The Eagle, she gathered, had been a totem of powerful nationalistic imagery for the Poles.
We know well what life can tell:
If you would not perish, then grow.
And today our fragile flesh and steel
Have laid their hands on a vaster wheel
With all of the stars to know
That the Eagle has landed. Tell your children when.
Time won't drive us down to dust again.
From all who tried out of history's tide.
Salute for the team that won.
And the old Earth smiles at her children's reach.
The wave that carried us up the beach
To reach for the shining sun.
For the Eagle has landed. Tell your children when.
Time won't drive us down to dust again.
There was no applause when the last chord sparkled into silence, only a long, collective sigh. "That piece has a very special meaning for Americans," Sinclair told Katya in a low voice. "I suppose it reminds us that we were first, before the Japanese, before the Terran Hegemony. We were great once. We will be again."
"My ancestors came from Kiev and Athens, General. We remember that those first pioneers came in peace for all Mankind."
"I guess you can look at it either way. The triumph of a nation. The triumph of the species. Either way, it should have been the beginning of a whole new era. An explosion of human diversity and culture and social experiment that filled Earth's Solar System.
"But the next men to set foot on Earth's moon were Japanese. They created a monopoly on space-based industries and never let go. We're living with the results of that to this day."
Katya studied the faces in the circle as they started another song. Most of them were so young . . . the student body of a school rather than an army. "Who are all these people anyway?" she asked Sinclair. "Refugees? They don't look like revolutionaries."
"Oh, they're refugees, I suppose. Most of them. But they're also the Confederation army." He pointed to a boy sitting across from the mentarist. "That guy was a Lifer activist. The Authority arrested him, forced him to download his entire RAM, and tried to rebrief him. It didn't take and he came here.
"The girl next to him, in the red skinsuit? That's Natalia. She couldn't afford anything better than the government's level one implant, but she had a friend who could get her the nano for a Model 200 and some unlicensed T-sockets. She got the implant, but the ID imprint was faulty. It gave her away the first time she tried to get a job. She managed to get away, though, and her friend brought her here.
"Now the guy in green, with the mustache . . . he's dangerous, a deserter. From Creighton's company, in fact. Name's Darcy, and he'd be shot if the bastards caught him. Next to him is Simone. You've met her. She's an absolute wonder with computers. Maybe too much so, because she was arrested for hacking the Heg Authority's tax offices.
"And that," he said, pointing at the mentarist, "is Lorita Fischer. She's in trouble because of her music."
Katya's eyebrows arched. "Her music?"
Creighton was sitting close enough to hear. He turned, grinning. "Hey, stuff like what she sings is seditious, didn't you know? Makes Newamies like us proud to be what we are, proud to be independent sons of bitches . . . instead of following the party line."
Katya listened to the next song and applauded softly with the others when it was done. But some deep reservations had taken hold of her, and she was having trouble shaking them.
The Rebel army consisted of kids and a ragtag mob of people representing a dozen different factions, political movements, and even criminal elements—a deserter, an illegal hacker, and maybe worse. None of them could be expected to have the same agenda or even the same way of going about the deadly serious business of revolution as their comrades. It was a recipe for chaos at best, for disaster at worst.
She might believe in the revolution now and subscribe to its ideals, but she had a terrible presentiment that the movement was doomed to failure. How long could such a disjointed and fragile alliance last against Dai Nihon?
In her own mind, she gave them perhaps one chance in ten.
Chapter 11
Weapons are an important factor in war, but not the decisive one; it is man and not materials that count.
—Mao Tse-tung
C.E. 1938
The Confederation army needed three things desperately: equipment of all kinds, professional training, and seasoning. The Thorhammers couldn't help with the first, and only combat. God help them, would help the last, but Katya could set up a training schedule in an attempt to pass on to the newbies some of what she and the others had learned in years of Warstrider service.
Since Katya had arrived on Eridu, the notion of hijacking a comel and using it to run a Confederation version of Operation Yunagi had nearly faded away, not so much forgotten as moot. Network Intelligence had not even been able to learn if there were comels on Eridu yet, or where they might be stored. The Imperial use of nuclear weapons proved that the Imperials weren't interested in peaceful communications with the Xenos, and that meant that Katya and the others might never get their chance.
Almost in compensation, then, Katya threw herself into working with the newbies. She'd run military training programs both on New America and on Loki, and she was able to help now with the selection and indoctrination of warstrider recruits. Only those with both T- and C-sockets could jack warstriders, of course, since temporal sockets were needed for data input, while the cervical socket was necessary for direct neural feedback to the cybernetic actuators. Few of the recruits had direct experience with anything more complex than constructors or the various all-terrain striders used in the rugged Outback.
That was enough to get started with, however, for the principles of cybernetic jacking were the same whether the machine was a warstrider, a starship, a four-legged cargo hauler, or a fifty-ton constructor. In fact, many of the handful of warstriders in the rebel inventory were actually converted civilian machines. Those newbies without the proper hardware were slated for the legger infantry, learning how to maneuver in full combat armor and how to operate, clean, and assemble laser weaponry, assault rifles, and stunners. With seemingly endless drill, and with simulators rigged from ViRcom units smuggled into the Babel Underground, the recruits began shaping up.
They'd already chosen a name for themselves: the Eridu Freestriders.
The Freestriders' few available combat machines were kept at a jungle b
ase, a collection of domes and underground storage facilities called Emden on the maps, located about fifty kilometers southwest of Babel. A fungus prospectors' trading and outfitting center for the past forty years, it had a permanent population of about fifty settlers, with perhaps half that number of transients at any given time . . . precisely the sort of place that Omigato would want to shut down. Already a Network member, the husmeister of the place had invited the rebels to use Emden for field training, for maintenance and storage of their heavy equipment, and as a staging area for operations in the jungle.
In Katya's opinion, the Freestriders were a warstrider unit in name only. It possessed one LaG-42 Ghostrider, two RLN-90 Scoutstriders, an Ares-12 Swiftstrider and a LaG-17 Fastrider, all of them compscammed from various Hegemony stores depots on the planet. Simone Dagousset, Katya learned, fully deserved her reputation as a genius when it came to any kind of computer hacking, and there were a handful of others like her in the rebel organization. By hacking false repair, replacement, or breakage write-off orders through various HEMILCOM stores facilities, they'd had those striders shipped to cargo depots at Babel, where rebel jackers had faked authorizing 'face IDs and simply walked them away.
By similar methods, four lumbering construction striders had been appropriated from some city dome or other and fitted out with bolted-on sheets of duralloy and jury-rigged lasers. Ammo, spare parts, and maintenance gear were almost nonexistent, however, and the strider squad bay was an empty equipment shed in the jungle.
Someday—come the revolution, as Sinclair liked to say—Creighton and other part-time rebels in the 3rd Mech Cav would add their own striders to the Confederation inventory, but that couldn't be allowed to happen until the rebels were strong enough to take on the Hegemony openly. In the meantime, the part-timers' positions with the government's forces were too valuable to jeopardize. Until covert insurrection became outright war, the rebels would have to make do with what they had: nine warstriders—four of them totally undeserving of the name—with almost nothing in the way of service or maintenance support if they broke down.