Warstrider: All Six Novels and An Original Novella

by Ian Douglas

  Gods, there was so much blood. . . .

  "My God, what are they doing?"

  "The bastards! The filthy, goking bastards!"

  "Shut up, people! Stay low!"

  Jamis Mattingly was huddled beneath a dun-colored thermal blanket with a dozen other people, peering miserably through his mask's dust-coated visor at the scene below. He and most of his staff had escaped through the mining tunnels and access shafts scant minutes after the Imperial Marines had grounded. Now he was hidden among the rocks high up in the rugged Sinai, using the thermal blankets to mask their body heat signatures from aircraft. Grim-faced militiamen crouched among the rocks nearby, watching with stony, emotionless eyes as the Imperial Marines completed the destruction of Tanis.

  There was no question whatsoever about the identity of the attackers. Mattingly was a former warstrider; he'd jacked Ghostriders with the Scots Greys on Caledon before emigrating to Eridu and becoming a fusion plant manager, and he knew all of the Imperial designs. This had been a marine op, a show of raw terror and naked force designed to . . . to what? He didn't think the marines were taking prisoners. Damn it, he wasn't conceited enough to think that the Impies were so eager for his head that they'd zero an entire town to get it. They must have a reason . . . but what was it?

  There were scattered reports of other survivors, some in the forest, others in the tunnels below. A number of people had fled in magflitters as soon as young Kleinst had arrived with his terrifying news. With luck, they might reach some of the neighboring Euphrates Valley towns and spread the alarm.

  A dull thud sounded from the town dome . . . followed by another. They were blowing things up in there, it sounded like. Many of the warstriders were already pulling out, clambering back aboard the waiting transports.

  Overhead, the ground support craft circled like vultures.

  "Why are they doing this!" a man screamed, his voice muffled by his breather mask but shrill and far too loud. "Why can't they leave us alone?"

  "Quiet, Franz," a woman replied harshly. "Quiet or I'll shut you up myself."

  On the whole, discipline was good, their chances of survival fair . . . unless those Imperial troops decided to comb the Sinai Heights boulder by boulder.

  No . . . the ground troops were also withdrawing, moving back to the transports at a trot. Their ammunition and armored suit power must be running low. Tanis lay silent, the interior of its transparent transplas dome obscured by a thick and oily haze.

  The biggest question was whether help would come. Their life support packs had air for two hours or so . . . less after the rugged climb through the tunnels. If no one got here from Sidon or Memphis, they would all be as dead as if they'd stayed in Tanis.

  No! They had to live, so that the other Eriduan communities could know what had happened here! If he had to compose a RAM message, download it to a volunteer, then give up his own life support pack to guarantee the messenger's survival, he would do it.

  With a black-humored stab of irony, Mattingly realized that he and the other survivors were witnessing history in the making. Once word began spreading among the other dome communities on Eridu, the Tanis Massacre would become immortalized, the first armed clash of the Hegemony Civil War.

  And with a passionate, fierce-driven conviction, he knew it would not be the last.

  Chapter 26

  Mankind will possess incalculable advantages and extraordinary control over human behavior when the scientific investigator will he able to subject his fellow men to the same external analysis he would employ for any natural object, and when the human mind will contemplate itself not from within but from without.

  —Scientific Study of So-called

  Psychical Processes in the Higher Animals

  Ivan Petrovich Pavlov

  C.E. 1906

  Dev was linked to his warstrider, moving through streets awash in blood. There were bodies everywhere, bodies twisted like rags, bodies soaked with blood, pieces of bodies that looked like they'd been cleanly diced on some butcher giant's cutting board, others torn and shredded and burned, their glistening entrails spilled on the ground.

  God, there was so much blood. . . .

  He tried to turn his optics away, tried to focus on the burning buildings, on the pall of smoke filling the ruptured dome, but couldn't. He was searching for survivors, hunting them down as if they were scrabbling, scurrying vermin and executing them with clean and methodical bursts from his weapons.

  Movement to his left. He turned, and red targeting brackets closed on the lone human figure stumbling toward him, a white handkerchief clutched in blood-smeared fingers. The man was mouthing something. Dev had shut down his external mikes earlier because the screams of the children had hurt so. He switched them back on now.

  "Please! Help me!" the man was calling. "Please, help me!"

  But Dev's orders said . . .

  He stopped, trying to recall. His orders had been . . . had been . . . to patrol the area around the Tanis mining complex, to watch for Xenophobe activity, to protect the Tanis civilians if the Xenos attacked. . . .

  This, this massacre had been his idea.

  "Please help me!"

  Dev twitched his left arm, and the man fell to pieces, arms and legs, head and slices of torso slipping apart from one another in an explosion of startling scarlet.

  Satisfaction. The sempu was a devastating antipersonnel weapon. In his report to HEMILCOM he would have to tell them that it was truly . . . truly . . .

  Dev tried to move, tried to shake his head in outraged denial, but his brain no longer controlled his body. Dimly, he knew that someone else had taken over that task, as data continued to trickle in through his sockets, filling his cephlink with images of sheer, bloody honor.

  "Why did you do it, Cameron? We saw you do it, and we hare the recorder memories from your strider. What made you do it?"

  "I . . . I did n't . . . what you said . . . I couldn't—"

  "You ordered your company to destroy Tanis. Eighteen hundred helpless civilians massacred, the town dome cracked wide open. Do you know what happens to people forced to breathe Eridu's atmosphere? We'll show you. . . ."

  The pictures in Dev's mind were the stuff of nightmares, but sharpened to a hard, crisp focus that had none of a dream's sense of unreality, none of the distance or perspective experienced as it faded from memory.

  Instead, he experienced the reality of now in crisp, vivid detail.

  A dozen men and women were on the rubbery, yellow-orange stuff that passed for grass on Eridu, some on their hands and knees, others sprawled with legs and arms twisted, fingers clawing trenches in the earth. Mouths gaping, chests heaving with convulsive shudders, they struggled to breathe the oxygen-poor air, their lips turning blue, their eyes starting from their heads in their frenzied battle against suffocation.

  "My orders . . . my orders . . ."

  "You're telling us you were just following orders? You killed all those people and you were just following orders'?"

  "Yes! I mean no. . . ."

  "What is the real story, Cameron? What is the truth?"

  "I don't know. . . ."

  He didn't know. He remembered approaching Tanis with his company. He remembered receiving his orders: Patrol the area around the Tanis mining complex, watch for Xenophobe activity, protect the Tanis civilians if the Xenos attack. . . .

  No! No! No! His orders had been something else entirely, but he couldn't remember . . . couldn't remember. . . .

  Omigato's holographic image floated centimeters off the lab floor amid gleaming, white-surfaced sterility. Cameron, still in his striderjack's bodysuit, lay strapped to the tilt-top table, his head encased in a cephlink helmet. Tubes and cables snaked from the ceiling, power and data feeds for the helmet, medical life support tubes and medical sensor array cables for the suit. Several medical technicians and a DHS interrogator named Haas stood about the wired, motionless body.

  "How does the rebriefing proceed?" To Omigato's eye, it loo
ked as though the subject was dead. He could detect no movement in the chest.

  "Slowly, my Lord," the interrogator replied. "The subject has a comparatively strong grasp of reality."

  "How much longer? We will have to make an announcement soon."

  "Two more sessions should do it, my Lord." Haas said. "Three at the most. If we proceed too quickly, attempt to batter down his defenses with too much force, he could withdraw, become permanently catatonic. We would have to start from scratch then, with a brainclear and complete reprogramming." Haas shook his head. "The results would not be optimal."

  "You have another twenty hours." Omigato broke the connection and he floated once again in the zero-G privacy of his quarters.

  Twenty hours. The local authorities should be able to keep things under control that much longer, at least. There'd been the inevitable wave of alarm in the wake of the Tanis Massacre. The governor's office had been besieged with calls, a storm of questions, pleas, threats, and demands for clarification, for news, for some kind of official announcement. There were reports of militias in eighteen towns and cities mustering or on alert, though whether that was to maintain the peace in their own regions or to attack Hegemony forces was still unclear.

  That announcement, of course, already composed and ready for transmission, said that the gaijin koman assigned to a Hegemony strider unit had gone berserk, ordering his unit to attack Tanis, but that he and those of his men who'd followed him were all in custody. The download from Tai-i Devis Cameron's personal RAM, bearing his own access codes and IDs, would prove that he had given the orders, that he and a few of his men had slaughtered the population of a helpless town.

  The Tanis Massacre had occurred nearly forty hours earlier, and there were unfortunate, disturbing indications that things had not gone entirely to plan in one respect at least. The Tanis population, apparently, had had warning enough that many had escaped, despite the marine net thrown about the area to catch fleeing refugees. Jamis Mattingly, one of the most important rebel leaders, had turned up alive in Sidon, a city some thirty kilometers downriver from Tanis. According to observers at the scene. Mattingly and others were passing around direct memories of the attack, memories showing Imperial warstriders and troops slaughtering helpless civilians.

  It would have been better—a smoother, cleaner operation—if there'd been no survivors at all from Tanis, but Omigato was already adapting to the situation. Once Cameron's memories of the incident were publicly displayed, it would be one set of claims against another, the radicals against the government, the nuts against those who knew that such things couldn't happen here. Opinion on Eridu would be polarized, and the division might even lead to fighting between rebel groups and the government. There would be many, a majority perhaps, who felt that an Imperial attack on Tanis was unthinkable, that such talk was obviously greenie or lifer propaganda.

  All of which would provide the necessary excuse for direct Imperial intervention.

  And no matter what happened on Eridu, the real battle would already be won simply because the Empire controlled the ships—and hence, the communication—between star systems. The news that reached Earth and the Imperial Palace would be that Devis Cameron, the gaijin trusted with communicating with the Xenophobes, had gone mad . . . possibly from the strain of his contact with the aliens on the Alyan expedition, possibly because the Xenos themselves had somehow twisted or controlled his mind.

  That alone would be the victory Omigato sought. The pro-gaijin elements of His Majesty's government and personal staff would be discredited once and for all. The Emperor—dare he hope such a thing?—the Emperor himself might decide to take personal responsibility for what had happened. Next in line in the Imperial succession was a protégé of Gensui Munimori, like Omigato, a Man of Completion.

  As for Eridu, Omigato decided that in the long run it didn't much matter whether the locals knew about the Imperial involvement at Tanis or not. One way or the other, the excuse he needed to turn the full weight of the Hegemony and Imperial armed forces against the planet's rebellious populace was already there. He need only wait for Earth and His Majesty to recognize the situation and grant him the authority to deal with it.

  And deal with it he would.

  Dev awoke once again on the cot inside his narrow cell. Such dark, disturbing dreams. . . .

  Not dreams. Or rather . . . dreams, but not his. Nightmares created by computer, or channeled through his cephlink from someone else.

  Shakily, he sat up, swinging his legs off the cot and feeling the cold roughness of the floor beneath his bare feet. Now, in the interlude between sessions, he knew what they were trying to do. Like anyone with a RAM implant, Dev possessed two broad types of memory, one biological, the other artificial. The biological memory could be fooled, or it could be blurred or erased by drugs or neural feeds, but the only way to deliberately implant false memories was through hypnosis—notoriously unreliable—or by feeding falsified data through the cephlink.

  He'd heard of this sort of thing, though always as a kind of darkly whispered rumor, as tales without proof or substance. "Rebriefing" it was called, the word coined from RAM-edited briefing. Once it had been a military briefing tool allowing updates in published data to be written directly into their RAMs. His intracranial RAM was not as discriminating as his organic brain and would accept anything fed to it. The treatment he was getting here was designed to distort his personal reality, to smash down his barriers between truth and lie.

  If they kept at it long enough, he would either end up forgetting what was real and accepting their memories as truth, or he would be driven hopelessly, mindlessly mad.

  Already, his memories were disjointed. He remembered being brought to this place, a military dome on the outskirts of Babel, he thought. As soon as they'd pulled him from his strider down in Winchester they'd snapped a horseshoe device around the back of his head, something like a commpac with plugs that snapped into all three sockets.

  After that, things were fuzzy and remote. They called the devilish thing a Kanrinin, a controller, and it was just that, operating through his cephlink to cut out his will and leave him pliable and content, willing to do anything his captors told him to do, unable to speak or act or even think on his own. He could remember only fragments of what came next—of boarding a monorail in Winchester and of being switched off, of waking again sometime later and being led here, to this cell.

  Then the interrogation had begun.

  That, too, was fragmentary—fortunately. He only recalled bits and pieces of his "softening up," as the interrogator had so cheerfully called it. He didn't know whether that was deliberate on the part of his captors, another means of twisting his sense of time and reality, or evidence of some sort of natural cutout in his mind, a way for his brain to protect itself.

  The fragments he retained, though, were still painfully fresh and raw. He remembered being strapped naked to a kind of open framework that had allowed them access to every part of his body. He remembered the razor gleam of scalpels turning in the light, the terrifying pop-hiss as a blowtorch was lit, his fascination with the flame's glow as it descended toward unprotected flesh. He remembered screaming and screaming and screaming until his throat had gone raw, leaving him unable to voice more than a rasping croak. He kept trying to pass out, willing himself into oblivion, but the trickle of energy feeding through his sockets and into his brain would not let him be anything but hideously, shockingly awake.

  But eventually, they'd let him faint, to awaken once more back in his cell, shaking and sweat-soaked, the memory of pain very nearly as sharp as the pain itself. With an unexpectedly strong reluctance, terrified of what he might see, he'd looked down at himself, minutely checking feet, fingers, hands, genitals. He'd brought a trembling but blessedly intact hand to his face, touching ears, nose, tongue, and lips, checking, cataloging . . .

  Everything's still there. The trembling stopped, but he still felt kitten-weak. It was all a dream.

  But i
t seemed so real!

  It had been real. Had those images been manufactured, in the same way that an AI could manipulate artificial memories in a ViRdrama? Or had they been the genuine memories of some poor soul tortured to provide his interrogators with a handy instant replay, a tool for breaking the minds of other prisoners without breaking their bodies?

  During one session, he'd actually found himself hovering above that hellish rack, watching as the interrogators carved away at his writhing body, and he'd been certain that he'd gone completely mad at last. Again, he'd awakened later, still, impossibly, whole and intact, but with a dimming grasp of who he was and what he'd been doing . . . before.

  There'd been three initial "softening" sessions, he thought . . . or maybe four. After that, the images had turned to memories of his assault on Tanis.

  He remembered, and the shaking began again. He thought he was going to be sick. Had those memories been manufactured? Or were they real? Some of the control discretes and data overlays he'd seen were unfamiliar, and he suspected from the feel of the thing that the warstrider was an Imperial model, a Tanto, possibly, or a Tachi. He'd never jacked an Imperial strider, so those disturbingly real memories had to be from a Japanese unit.

  Or had they been memories downloaded from a Ghost-rider? It was so hard to remember. They'd been interspersed with questions and harsh interjections from his tormentors.

  "You are a traitor, Cameron. Just like your father."

  "My father was a hero!"

  "Your father turned a Starhawk missile on the Lung Chi space elevator during the evacuation. He was responsible for the deaths of half a million Manchurian civilians."

  "The Xenophobes were coming up the sky-el. There were millions of people already at synchorbit. They all would have died if he hadn't acted—"

  "There was no danger to them or to anyone else. He destroyed the elevator, allowing the Xenophobes to slaughter the people still on the surface. Just like you slaughtered those poor people in Tanis."