by Ian Douglas
"This way, please, Chujosan."
The room chosen for him was identical to the one holding the captured genies, save that it had been provided with a desk and chair. The desk had the standard electronics built into it, complete with interface screen, network links, and 3-D projector.
The prisoner brought to him minutes later was human, wearing the tatters of civilian clothing and a kanrinin locked about the back of his head. He was short and chubby and black-haired, with dark eyes now gone vacant and a soft and pampered body running to fat. His guard guided him easily, with a hand lightly touching his elbow.
"That will be all," Kawashima told the guard. "Wait outside."
"Hai, Chujosan!"
Kawashima touched the desk's interface, downloading a command. The pattern of lights on the prisoner's kanrinin shifted, and his eyes focused suddenly.
"I am Chujo Kawashima, the admiral commanding the Imperial squadron. You, I gather, were one of the traitor Sinclair's senior aides."
"Uh . . . yessir. Pol Danver . . ."
"I know your name. I know a great deal about you." Indeed, he'd downloaded Danver's entire personal file before he'd left the Donryu. "What I want you to tell me, immediately and without any attempt at deception, is where your Travis Sinclair has gone."
Danver licked his lips, a quick, nervous flick of the tongue. "Sir, I, I mean, I don't know. I swear, he didn't tell me. . . ."
Kawashima kept his left hand splayed on the slick, black surface of the desk's interface. Danver's eyes were riveted on that hand, his fists clenched tight at his sides. The kanrinin could render a man instantly pliable, instantly docile. It could also transmit exquisite pain through direct neural stimulation.
"Technology invokes truly godlike power," Kawashima said, his voice light and conversational. His splayed hand did not move. "With a thought, I could plunge you into a lake of fire. I could reward you with an orgasm unlike any you have ever experienced. I could kill you, simply by commanding your heart to stop."
"Sir . . . please, please! . . . I'd tell you if I could! I swear! I never liked Sinclair. Never! I only worked for him because I had to."
That was certainly true. Danver's psychological profile suggested that he was a small and bitter man who sought power in the intrigues of petty office politics. Sinclair had a reputation for advancing personnel by merit rather than for seniority's sake, and Danver had almost certainly felt slighted by the rebel politician-general more than once.
"Perhaps, then, you could tell me about some of Sinclair's people. When he disappeared, a number of others vanished with him. Staff personnel. Senior military officers. Delegates to this so-called Congress of yours." Kawashima allowed himself to show a thin smile. "I notice that when they made their escape, they left you behind to face my marines."
"Yeah, you got that right. Uh, sir." Craftiness flickered behind the dark eyes. "Actually, Admiral-san, they were going to take me too. They didn't say where, but I was, well, I was pretty well placed, y'know? I was General Sinclair's chief aide."
"Go on."
"But I'm a realist. I knew this revolution could never amount to anything, except pain and suffering and death for millions of people. So I volunteered to stay behind. I, well, I figured I could surrender, see? Maybe help you to, to end this thing."
"I see." The man's ingratiating tone grated on Kawashima's nerves, but he nodded and smiled. "Believe me, Danver-san, you have made the correct choice. However, to prove your good faith, you must provide me with useful information. Otherwise . . ." He let his gaze drop to his motionless hand.
"Uh, yeah. I mean, yessir. Believe me, I want to help! Uh . . . look. Maybe you didn't know. Sinclair's definitely left New America. His people're claiming that he's hiding out in the Outback, but that ain't true. Some of his people managed to sneak him and maybe two hundred of the government's chief people off-planet."
"Indeed?" Kawashima had already surmised as much, of course, but the fact that Danver had told him as much suggested that the man genuinely wanted to cooperate. "Who helped him?"
"Uh . . . his name's Dev Cameron. He's, I don't know. Used to be a strider, though lately he's been jacking starships. He's the guy that captured one of your ships at Eridu. He's kind of a bigwig in Sinclair's organization, y'know? Young guy, twenty-eight, twenty-nine standard, maybe, but Sinclair's made him a navy captain and gave him command of a raiding force to go hit your shipyard at Athena."
Kawashima kept his face expressionless. Word of the raid at Daikoku had arrived weeks ago, but no one in Imperial Military Intelligence knew where the raiders had come from. Danver might prove to be a valuable source of information after all.
"And where did this Cameron take Sinclair and the others?"
Danver's tongue flicked across fleshy lips. "I don't know. I'm sorry, but . . . but I really don't know."
"Come now. You can't expect me to believe that. They must intend to set up the rebel government in some other system. Surely they would arrange for private communications channels elsewhere, through trusted staff aides, for instance."
Danver shook his head. "No! No, sir, they didn't tell me!"
"Think, Danver-san. You must know something, must have seen something." His hand remained on the interface, a menacing presence.
"Wait! There, there's one thing. Maybe. I, I didn't know much about, didn't think much about it, but there's one thing."
"Yes?"
"The Xeno . . ."
"A Xenophobe? What Xenophobe?"
"There's this crazy idea, see? The scientist-types've been kicking it around for a long time. You see, they made contact with a Xeno on Eridu. Talked to it, even. Then they got it to pinch off a piece of itself. The idea is that, since this piece of a Xeno knows about us, about Man, I mean, and knows how to communicate with us, they can introduce it to a wild Xeno on some other planet."
"A calling card," Kawashima said thoughtfully.
"Uh, sorry? What's that?"
"An old and long-extinct form of social propriety. Please, continue."
"I don't know a whole lot else. They brought the tame Xeno with them from Eridu. Kept it in a vault underground in Jefferson. I saw it there several times."
"Did you . . . talk to it?"
"Me? Jeez, no. Wouldn't catch me touching that slimy thing."
"What happened to it?"
"They moved it, I think, just about when your squadron entered the system. Again, I wasn't in on that part of it, but there was talk about sending it somewhere else aboard a liner the government had bought."
Kawashima sat behind the desk for a long moment, thunderstruck. This was an intelligence coup of the very highest order. Danver had just delivered two vital pieces of information. The first was the simple knowledge of how the rebels planned to communicate with wild Xenos, something that had eluded Imperial and Hegemony researchers ever since the Alyan Expedition. Up until now, communicating with a Xeno had required a DalRiss comel . . . and the nerve to confront a wild Xeno in its underground lair. But it sounded as though the rebels had hit upon another way, one simpler, safer, and more certain. Kawashima had downloaded enough about Xenophobe biology to guess that the method might well work.
And even more important, Danver had just unknowingly shown Kawashima how to find the escaped renegades.
His palm still on the interface, Kawashima directed a thought to the desk's electronics. Danver stiffened, a look of intense fear flashing suddenly in his eyes as he felt the kanrinin switch operational modes. Then his eyes went blank, his knees buckled, and he dropped to the floor, his back and hips arching and jerking spasmodically. Danver's mouth gaped, fishlike, as he thrashed about, his entire body infused with overwhelming, uncontrollable, fiercely intense pleasure.
"Ah! . . . ah! . . . AH! AH! AH!" His cries brought the guard back into the room, but Kawashima dismissed the soldier with a careless wave. He remained unmoving for several minutes more, before sending another command through the interface. Danver shuddered, then went limp. For a l
ong moment, there was no sound in the room save the wet rasps of the prisoner's breathing.
"I believe in immediately rewarding those who loyally serve me," Kawashima said at last. "You have been of enormous help to me. That was your reward."
"Oh . . . wow." Shakily, Danver sat up, but he was too weak to stand. A dark stain had appeared above the crotch of his trousers, which he clumsily tried to cover. "I . . . oh, wow . . ."
It was another five minutes before Danver could speak coherently. The impulse Kawashima had just sent through his pleasure center carried far more kick than any normal orgasm.
"The guard will see to it that you get a fresh change of clothing," Kawashima told the man as he slowly and shakily rose to his feet. "Tell me, Danver-san. Would you consent to receiving a kokennin?"
Danver blinked at him, as though trying to understand the words. A thin strand of drool hung from his lower lip. He tried to wipe it away and failed.
Where the kanrinin was an external device, a jack-in electronics module to control a prisoner, the kokennin was internal and far more subtle. The word was Nihongo for guardian, and for good reason. Grown, like a cephlink, by programmed nano injected into the bloodstream, the kokennin assembled itself as an addition to the link hardware in and around the sulci of the brain, tapping directly into the subject's personal RAM and providing an easy means of monitoring his movements, his actions, and his contacts. Though it could not transmit private thoughts—sadly, that technology was yet far from perfect—it also provided an easy and reliable means of learning whether or not the subject was telling the truth.
"I, uh, sure," Danver said. "Sure. Why not?"
"If you voluntarily accept a kokennin, I can offer you a position on my own staff. You could be of considerable use to me."
"Hey, that's great. Uh . . . does that mean that you, I mean, uh, if I work for you, do you think I could have, uh, have another shot of what you just gave me?" There was hunger in his eyes.
"Certainly. If you provide additional useful information or insight into the plans and thoughts of the rebels. I must caution you that such, um, experiences must be carefully rationed. There are many people, weak-willed and vulnerable, who become addicted to pleasure center stimulation."
"Yeah." He licked his lips. "I can see why. But you won't have to worry about me. I can handle it, no problem."
"I know you can," Kawashima lied. Eventually, probably, the man would become hopelessly addicted to PCS and would have to be disposed of. He directed a thought through the interface, and the guard appeared again. "Take this man to a room of his own. Provide him with a clean uniform, food, and whatever else he needs. Dismissed."
Kawashima was honestly not sure what else Danver could offer him but was willing to keep him on against the chance that he would, indeed, prove useful again. Besides, Kawashima felt a certain amount of gratitude. Through his cooperation, two invaluable pieces of data had been obtained.
In particular, he'd just narrowed Sinclair's possible hiding places from unknown hundreds to just five . . . the worlds where wild Xenophobes were known to exist.
An-Nur II: called Fardus—Paradise—a hellish place of desert sands and sterile rock, and the first world where Man had confronted Xenophobe.
Sandoval: thin-aired, barren, and frigid, a mining colony destroyed thirty-five years ago.
Herakles: partially terraformed world of vast oceans and rugged mountains, site of Colonel Nagai's disgrace.
Loki: chill and desert world of 36 Ophiuchi C, where the Hegemony had won its first clear victory against the Xeno foe. It was thought that all of the Xenos on Loki had been killed two years ago using ground-penetrating nuclear devices, but it was certainly possible that some lived there still. A world was an enormous place.
Lung Chi: the Manchurian-colonized world overrun in 2538, grave for five thousand betrayed Imperial Marines.
Kawashima did not count the sixth Shichiju world where Xenophobes were known. Eridu, after all, was where peaceful contact had already been made with the things, and, in any case, Sinclair and the others would not be likely to flee back to the world from which they'd just escaped. Nor did he count the Alyan worlds. They were far, far beyond the Shichiju's borders, there were Imperial ships stationed there, and the alien DalRiss were a constant uncertainty.
His eyes narrowed at a new thought. Cameron . . . Cameron . . . wasn't that the name of the gaijin admiral who had destroyed Lung Chi's sky-el? Interfacing with the planet's Imperial link network, Kawashima downloaded several thousand bytes of data.
Yes . . . as with Herakles, at Lung Chi there'd also been the threat of Xenos coming up the space elevator, and Admiral Michal Cameron had sent a missile into the structure. Broken far above the surface, the sky-el had been subjected to far greater stresses than the one over Herakles and been shattered, with terrible loss of life. Worse, a million citizens and five thousand Imperial Marines had been trapped on the planet's surface. Cameron had been court-martialed and later had committed suicide.
He'd had two sons. One was Devis Cameron, a former Hegemony officer and winner of the Imperial Star, but now defected to the rebel forces.
Kawashima thought he knew where Devis Cameron had fled to.
Or . . . possibly not. Young Cameron might intentionally avoid a world which bore family connections . . . and might therefore allow him to be traced.
No matter. With New America nearly secure, Kawashima could afford to check all of the possibilities. He would dispatch flotillas of ships to each of the five systems, with orders to check the Xeno-occupied worlds carefully for any trace of rebel presence.
In fact, Loki was unlikely on several counts. The Hegemony maintained an important base in orbit and, in any case, there probably weren't any Xenos left to contact there. It would be possible to hide a rebel government within Loki's cities, certainly, but difficult to carry on business as usual with the Hegemony watching. Kawashima would dispatch only one ship there, with orders to inquire of the Lokan governor about possible rebel activity.
Sandoval, too, was unlikely, as was An-Nur II. A rebel government-in-exile would need supplies, food, air, water, or the means to manufacture them. Refugees on either of those two worlds would be so busy surviving they would have no time to plot rebellion. One small warship or two to each of those systems would be enough to scan them for signs of fusion-generated power.
Which left Lung Chi and Herakles. Those two he would check carefully with large squadrons . . . especially Lung Chi.
Smiling, he began composing the orders that would set Ohka Squadron in motion.
Chapter 20
The first encounter with Xenophobes was on An-Nur II, an Islamic colony orbiting the K5 star DM+2o 4706. A desert world, incompletely terraformed, the planet possessed but five major centers of human population, all existing under sealed domes, when the Xenophobes emerged from the ground in C.E. 2498 and attacked, apparently without provocation. The second incursion-alerting the Hegemony that this was an interstellar threat—was in 2508 at Sandoval, a mining colony on the tide-locked world of Ross 906 I.
But the first world with a large population and a viable environment to be attacked by the Xenophobes was Herakles. . . .
—A History of the Xenophobe Wars
Constantine Li Xu
C.E. 2543
For some billions of years before the coming of Man, Herakles—Mu Herculis III—had remained a typical prebiotic planet, a place of liquid water oceans beneath stormy and opaque skies of carbon dioxide. Such worlds were common; life, requiring such factors as tides—in order to create the gentle pools where life might arise—and a precise balance between an environment too hostile and one too mild, was comparatively rare.
Just over thirty light-years from Sol, the Mu Here system had been surveyed by the Imperial Sekkodan, the Scout Service, in the early 2200s. Like 26 Draconis, it was a trinary system, with a young, hot G5 IV star circled at a distance by a close-paired doublet of M4 red dwarfs. The subgiant primary was twice as m
assive, three times more luminous, than Sol; at 4.1 AUs remove, the world dubbed Herakles had been hot, cloud-shrouded and poisonous, with temperatures well above fifty Celsius.
Hegemonic terraformers had begun building the first chain of atmosphere generators in 2238. These mountain-sized nanofactories gulped down the native air and broke it into forms more useful to the newcomers—nitrogen, oxygen, and water—with vast reserves of carbon converted to diamond carballoy for the ongoing construction of the new colony's sky-el. As the skies cleared, the world became cooler . . . and cooler. Now, temperatures in the equatorial temperate zone rarely rose above twenty-five Celsius, and the mid-latitudes endured long and bitterly cold winters during the world's nearly six-year-long orbit.
With the sky-el in place in 2305, the world's colonization had begun in earnest. From a planetary engineer's point of view, the sky-el was little more than an immense suspension bridge, balanced in the sky above Herakles's equator, its center of mass positioned at synchorbit so that the entire, forty-thousand-kilometer-long structure orbited the world in precisely one local day, so that it remained forever suspended above the same point on the equator. The colony's capital of Argos had grown up at the sky-el's towerdown. In the early 2300s it was no more than a collection of diacarb domes above Stamphalos Bay, on the southern shores of the Augean Peninsula. Two centuries later, the city domes had been opened to a blue-gold and friendly sky, black volcanic rock and sand had been nanotechnically crumbled to soil, and genetically tailored life—carpet grass and forests, insects and small mammals, all the myriad intricacies in a newborn planetary ecology—was engulfing a world reborn in green. Half a million colonists lived on Herakles, and the Hegemony Emigration Service estimated that by 2600 a million people a year would be riding the sky-el down from Herakles Synchorbital to Argos after their month-long passage aboard crowded Koshu-Maru transports. The colonization of terraformed worlds would never catch up with the relentless pace of Earth's still-burgeoning population, but such worlds as Herakles offered new starts for those daring enough—or desperate enough—to quit the security of the seething hive cities of Man's birthworld for the poverty—and freedom—of life on the Frontier.