Warstrider: All Six Novels and An Original Novella

by Ian Douglas

  "No!"

  He no longer knew what to believe. He did know that the bastards were winning, winning, and that, somehow, was the most wrenching torture of all.

  They hadn't told him what they wanted of him, hadn't even asked any questions save for those designed to keep him off balance, to make him question his own actions, even his own thoughts.

  "Why did you do it?"

  "But I didn't! It's a lie!"

  "You are lying. We know you did it. This is you killing those people. Why are you lying to us?"

  He checked his internal RAM. It had been twenty-six hours since they'd begun interrogating him. He knew that they would keep at him and at him until he broke, until he told them what they wanted him to tell them, or said what they wanted him to say. He'd already decided to make them work for it, though. He would not cooperate with them of his own free will.

  The Hegemony had reinforced its Eridu garrison. The soldiers who guarded him in this RoPro-walled fortress were Chiron Centurians, a crack unit raised and trained on Alpha Centauri. Dev thought they must have arrived in the last few days, because he'd heard nothing of their arrival while he'd been at Winchester.

  The Hegemony must be nervous about the Eriduan response to Tanis. Dev didn't much blame them, and he could understand why they wanted to pin the blame on him. He wondered if enough people had survived the Tanis Massacre that the truth would get out.

  He didn't want to be thought of as the murderer of eighteen hundred people. . . .

  Dev felt a tremor in the floor, a grinding vibration somewhere far beneath his feet. Wearily, he closed his eyes. It was possible that this was a created dream, a virtual reality being pumped into his brain to further distort the boundaries of what was real and what was not. He might only think he was sitting here in his bare-walled cell, when in fact he was . . .

  The trembling in his body began again and he wanted to scream: Stop it stop it stop it! Eyes closed, he took a deep breath, then opened them again. Nothing in the room appeared to have changed. His cell was three meters high, four long, two wide, with rough-textured RoPro walls and a wire grating over the single small fluoro light source in the ceiling. There were no other fixtures save a drain in the floor and an iris door in one narrow wall. His cot was a simple affair of tubing and wire, with a bare mattress that stank of ammonia and other stale, less definable odors.

  Concentrating, he realized he could hear sounds . . . someone screaming, he thought. And the thud of running footsteps.

  What was real, and what a lie? The thumping sound was louder now, and he realized that by the fluorostrip's light he could see tiny, individual dust motes dancing off the far wall. He blinked, then rubbed his eyes. An earthquake?

  The building lurched, and Dev found himself lying on his back on the hard floor. The wall opposite his bunk split from floor to ceiling, opening in a ragged crack that spilled dirt and loose gravel into his cell. He felt the tug of a violent wind lashing at his bodysuit and his hair and he knew that the dome must have been breached because he could hear the pale shriek of escaping air. Reflexively, he held his breath, then let it go, knowing that it was useless.

  Memory surfaced, of the civilians he'd seen outside of Tanis, bug-eyed, mouths working like beached fish, and Dev, already strung to the very edge of mental endurance, screamed, a shrill and wavering cry of sheer terror. He was up and standing on his cot, both fists hammering against the unyielding wall behind it. "Let me out! Let me out! Let me out!" One dark corner of his mind realized that this, too, must be another illusion, a manufactured nightmare designed to unhinge him, and he no longer cared. He simply had to escape that narrow cell, which had suddenly taken on all of the aspects of a sealed and buried coffin.

  Then another explosion knocked him down again, and he lay on the floor as the thinning air howled around him.

  The door was irising open. . . .

  Chapter 27

  Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.

  —James Madison

  Eighteenth century

  He didn't recognize the woman who stepped through the open door, a bundle of breath masks clutched in one hand and a businesslike 10mm Steyr-Hitachi subgun in the other. Her features were hidden by a visor and breath mask, and she wore a ceramiplas armor cuirass that left her legs and arms free. No helmet; her long black hair was pulled back from her face with a red headband.

  "Who . . . are you?" The air wasn't too bad yet, but it tasted different. Thinner, and there was a rubbery smell to it, like something burning.

  "Never mind." Her eyes narrowed as she stared into his face. "You're Cameron."

  It was not a question. He decided she must have a RAMed image of him, and she'd just compared the download with what she saw sitting on the floor of the cell.

  Shakily, he rose to his feet. "At the moment. I'm not real sure who I am. What the hell's going on?"

  "Hey, not a thing. We're just here to rescue you, is all." She held out one of the masks and he took it, pressing it to his face. Instead of a two-hour life support pack, it was fed from small gas bottles extending from either side of its blunt snout. He touched the control and drew a breath of rubbery-smelling air.

  As he donned the mask, she reached up behind her left ear and touched the compatch plugged into her T-socket. "Sierra One, Sierra One-five." she said. "I've got Cameron." She listened a moment. "Right. We're moving!"

  "What's going on?"

  She gestured impatiently. "Bad guys coming. Let's odie!"

  She ducked back through the door and, his bare feet crunching on gravel blasted from the walls, Dev followed. In the passageway just outside, a Hegemony guard in brown fatigues lay sprawled on his back, a brilliant red hole marring his cheek just below his left eye.

  Dev stared at the body a moment, trying to force his brain to work. A rescue? Pushing back the fog that still clouded his mind, he stooped and retrieved the guard's rifle, a PCR-28 high-velocity rifle. He checked the counter on the stock magazine: two hundred 4mm caseless rounds, safety on. He flicked the safety off and followed his rescuer over piles of debris partly blocking the narrow passageways.

  "Captain!"

  He turned at the familiar voice. Chu-i Paul DeVreis was moving down the passageway, following a young, sandy-haired man in partial armor much like the girl's.

  "Paul!" How many of the rest of A Company had been brought here? He had dim memories of seeing others while he was being taken aboard the monorail in Winchester, but he'd not seen anyone from his unit since arriving here.

  He wanted to ask if DeVreis had seen the others, but the woman called to them from up ahead. "Hurry, hurry! We're on a schedule!" She ducked through a gap low in the corridor wall. He followed on hands and knees . . .

  . . . and emerged in a blaze of heat and light. Dev blinked at the sky through his visor; until that moment, he'd not known whether it was day or night, and he was feeling disoriented, lost in time as well as in place.

  They were standing in a jagged gap in the curving transplas wall of a fifty-meter dome situated in a circular jungle clearing. The air still escaping from the hab was whipped past him in a minor windstorm of swirling dust, and the jungle trees at the edge of the clearing thirty meters distant were rippling with the gust. The air outside was a furnace after the relative coolness inside. Dev took three steps, and the sweat bathing his body plastered his bodysuit to his skin. Turning, he saw the slender, laser-straight column of Eridu's space elevator vanishing into a blue-green zenith. So he was near Babel . . . only a few kilometers from the main dome, it looked like.

  An explosion behind him and to his right made Dev flinch and duck. There was a battle going on. Half a dozen troops held a perimeter about the gap in the dome. Lasers flicked and skittered overhead, made briefly visible by the streaks they scratched through the rising dust and smoke. At the jungle's edge, the nanoflage-blurred shape of a Ghostrider crouched on bent, spla
y-footed legs, snapping off bolt after flaring bolt from its chin turret laser. Dev saw other bodies, some in the uniforms of Hegemony leggers, others in the mismatched armor and civilian clothing of the attackers.

  Bandits, he thought. These are the hill bandits they told us about. But it was impossible to think of them as mere bandits. They moved with a quickness and a coordination that suggested they'd had at least some training. One of the men, who looked like he was in charge of the ground troops, was wearing full combat armor displaying the shoulder emblem of the 3rd New American Mechanized Cavalry, and Dev guessed that it was his, not stolen. A strip of red cloth had been tied around his right arm just below the shoulder pauldron, and when Dev looked, he saw that all of the rebels wore similar rags, or had daubed their armor with identifying stripes of red paint.

  That's how they knew where we were, Dev thought. Traitors . . .

  Traitors? He arrested the thought as he stumbled barefoot across the hot ground. Traitors had just in all probability saved his life. And who was the real traitor, the soldier who refused to obey a direct order, or the government that issued immoral orders?

  He could tell that he was going to have to redefine some of his terminology.

  Another combat machine, a LaG-17 Fastrider, lurched from the woods, its torso swiveling back and forth atop its squat actuator assembly like the questing head of a beast of prey. It seemed to track on whatever the Ghostrider was firing at, then joined in with a barrage of laser fire from its hornlike laser mandibles. A rocket streaked in from somewhere, trailing a white contrail, bursting against the Fastrider's hull with a flash and a bang that scattered tiny chunks of armor, but the machine kept firing with a steady, uninterrupted rhythm, walking its bolts slowly across the upper levels of the dome.

  Dev's feet were in agony, already blistering along the soles, though they still didn't hurt as much as what they'd done to him earlier, in his mind. He stumbled and fell to his knees.

  "Dev!"

  The voice, a woman's voice, boomed from the Ghostrider towering at the jungle's edge. Dev gaped up at the duralloy monster, not daring to believe what he'd just heard.

  It occurred to him that this was all some kind of elaborate ViRdrama. It couldn't be Katya in that LaG-42, not here!

  "Help him," the woman's voice said from the LaG-42's external speaker. "His feet are burned!"

  "Katya?" He still couldn't believe it. It's real! It's real! Please let it be real! "Katya, is that you?"

  "It's a long story, Dev," Katya replied. "I'll explain later."

  The big New American trooper scooped an armored gauntlet under his arm and helped him up. A rebel in partial armor took his other arm and helped him limp toward one of ten magflitters resting on the ground twenty meters away.

  Katya, here! She'd been heading for New America! How had she gotten to Chi Draconis?

  And what was she doing with the hill ban—

  —with the rebels?

  A deadly, squat delta-shape screeched low over the jungle, and the Ghostrider and Fastrider in perfect unison swiveled, elevated, and loosed a pounding laser barrage. Dev saw a flash from the low-flying aircraft but couldn't tell if the hit had done any damage. He heard a shout and saw some rebels nearby drop to their bellies and begin shooting. Hegemony troops were spilling from an airlock in the dome nearby. Dev wanted to snatch up his rifle and join in the firing, but he'd lost his weapon along the way—back where he'd fallen, he thought—and his two escorts were in no mood to let him linger. At a dead run, they hurried him along, his feet barely touching the oven-hot ground. Reaching the magflitter, they handed him up the open cargo ramp to another pair of rebels waiting inside.

  Bev Schneider, Martin Koenig, and Wolef Helmann were already there, crouched in the dimly lit, windowless interior. The rest of A Company came limping up the ramp moments later. The harsh rattle of gunfire, the hiss and snap of lasers and plasma guns, intensified outside. A woman harnessed into the pilot's seat up forward, her VCH already jacked in, yelled back at them. "All secure?"

  "Go! Go!" a rebel with a smoke-stained face yelled back. The pilot slapped her palm onto her armrest interface and instantly sagged back in her seat, apparently unconscious. Around him, Dev heard the gathering whine of the flyer's mags spooling to full power, the clatter of something hard and metallic striking the outside hull, and then they were moving, lurching from side to side with hissing crashes as the windowless craft bashed its way through the trees.

  Katya watched the flitter rise on howling mags, wobble as gunfire struck sparks from its armor, then careen forward into the trees. She still wasn't certain she trusted her own feelings. Dev, a rebel!

  The news from the south that Tanis had been destroyed had been closely followed by whisperings that a gaijin working for the Imperials had been responsible. Hard on the heels of that rumor had come the news that the gaijin had actually been a hero, had defied direct Imperial orders to attack Tanis and even sent one of his people to warn the town.

  In both stories, the gaijin had been identified as Devis Cameron, winner of the Imperial Star, the man who'd dared attempt communication with the Xenophobes at Alya B.

  Long before, Katya had convinced herself that, if she didn't actually hate Dev now, she certainly disliked him, that their political views were diametrically opposed, that their relationship over the past several years had been a mistake. How could she possibly love a man who so completely embraced the philosophies, the elitist social theories, of Dai Nihon? Impossible!

  Unexpectedly, her feelings had started to change after her encounter with the Xenophobe Self. She still wasn't sure she understood what had happened to her, but something had changed inside her mind, her thoughts. At first, she'd wondered if the Xeno had physically changed her somehow; that had been a nightmare, as she wrestled with a purely human dread of the unknown.

  Then, as med and psych tests demonstrated that she'd had a shock but that she'd not been altered in any measurable way, she began to realize that the change lay purely in her perceptions.

  Until she'd confronted the Xeno, she'd seen only the differences between herself and Dev, the areas where they disagreed . . . or where they reacted to the world in different ways. Dev was more cautious, she more impulsive; he liked to reason things out, while she tended to act on feeling; he saw the advantages of the Empire's order and security, while she saw the thinly veneered chaos of arbitrary power and a stratified society; he thought of the Empire protecting humankind from itself, and she mourned the loss of individual liberty and personal rights.

  Differences . . . as mutually alien, she'd thought, as human and Xeno.

  But somehow, ever since her mind had momentarily blended with a Xenophobe's thought processes, differences in merely human points of view no longer seemed so vast . . . or so hard-chiseled in black-and-white absolutes.

  "Katya!" Chung's voice called, jerking her back to reality. He was jacking the long-range sensor gear in one of the transports. "We got transports incoming, range five klicks!"

  "Okay, people!" she snapped over the general frequency. "Company's on the way! Grab what you can and odie!"

  Rebel leggers were trotting from the now-smoking shell of the Hegemony dome, carrying or dragging bundles of weapons, cases of ammo or powerpacks, suits of combat armor. Several of the open magflitters had already been crammed full of military gear looted from the base armory. The haul included four light striders and a pair of DR-80 orbital warflyers, big, black, ugly shapes loaded aboard individual maglev transport sleds.

  A successful raid, no matter how you looked at it.

  But they'd only had a small garrison to contend with, and now reinforcements were on the way in, big time. It was time to withdraw.

  "Creighton! Are your people clear?"

  "Everybody's clear, Captain! We're out of here!"

  "Right! All units, fall back to the jungle and disperse! Execute E&E pattern Beta, with rendezvous at Green-Five! Move!"

  Explosions blossomed from the jungle, mushr
ooming above the forest canopy and into the crystalline sky above.

  They moved.

  From a rendezvous site in the jungle south of Babel, they'd returned to the city separately or in small groups after hiding vehicles and equipment in an underground bunker that had once been a prospector's maintenance shed. Dev and most of the other Terran Rangers entered the Towerdown dome aboard a convoy of eight flitters that had been coming up the coast road from the south, from Lagash and Flynnsport. There were plenty of Hegemony patrols on foot around Babel, he noted, but they weren't stopped at the Babel city dome for ID checks as he'd expected.

  He found out later that the Hegemony officers tasked with taking downloaded IDs from people entering and leaving Babel were in fact members of the Network, the whispered underground organization that was rapidly transforming Eridu into a center of resistance against the Hegemony government.

  That resistance was taking many and varied shapes. DIVERSITY IS LIFE! had been spray-painted across the Towerdown dome above the main airlock entrance. Lorita Fischer, the black-haired woman who'd freed Dev from his cell, was with him in the caravan truck, and she explained that the phrase was one of several Network slogans that had become popular lately. "Law for seventy is not liberty for one" was another. The idea that one government could embrace the needs, goals, morals, and outlooks of hundreds of separate human cultures on seventy-eight different worlds, she explained, was nonsense. By its nature, government was either small and personal, something on the level of a town hall meeting, or it was tyranny, with the few ruling the many for their own benefit, no matter how representational that government might be in theory.

  Dev found some of her views to rest little short of anarchist, but he had a hard time answering her charge that the Hegemony was a tyranny supported by military might.

  That evening, they assembled in an underground complex that Katya explained was hidden beneath a deserted building in Babel's Towerdown warehousing district. All of the rescued 4th Rangers were there, along with a number of the rebels. Dev had found himself surrounded by familiar faces. Chung was present, and Hagan and Nicholson, Torolf Bondevik, Erica Jacobsen, and Lara Anders. He didn't see Rudi Carlsson, though, and wondered if he'd stayed back on Loki.