Warstrider: All Six Novels and An Original Novella

by Ian Douglas

  "The worst part is coming back to do it all over again," Kara said, nodding agreement. "Can you sit up yet?"

  "I think so."

  As she helped him get up and out of the conmod, she wondered if Core Peek had been worth the price they'd paid for too damned little in the way of solid intel.

  "I wonder if it was worth it?" Ran asked, staring up at the image on the viewscreen and echoing her own dark thoughts. He seemed to sense her mood and reached out to put his arm around her shoulder. Normally, she discouraged such PDAs—public displays of affection, as they were known in the military—but she was tired and unhappy, and she needed that fleeting brush of human contact.

  "Damned if I know, Ran," she said, letting him squeeze her close. "Damned if I'll ever know."

  Chapter 5

  Anyone not convinced that genuine differences in thought processes, in worldview, in concepts such as self, duty, or society, exist between the members of different intelligent species—the products, remember, of separate and distinct evolutions, biologies, and histories—is invited to consider those differences as they are manifest between different cultures within the same species—Man. Japanese of traditional backgrounds perceive themselves quite differently in many fundamental respects than do, say, Hispanics, Europeans, or Americans. They are more in tune with their social surroundings, less tolerant of difference, more willing to sacrifice personal comfort or freedom for the good of society. It has been suggested that their talent for working together toward common goals is responsible for their remarkable success in the twenty-first century, when theirs became the dominant culture on Earth.

  —Rising Sun's Glory

  DARLENE HU

  C.E. 2530

  Admiral Isoru Hideshi was completely naked, as were the other five—three men, two women—sharing the shuttle pod's small passenger compartment for the passage across open space to Tenno Kyuden. The six of them were strapped into six of the twelve couches filling the pod's claustrophobic cabin. Acceleration provided their only sensation of weight.

  His nudity bothered him scarcely at all; it was a small loss of men—the word could mean either face or mask—that was more than compensated for by the rich symbolism of the act. By shedding their clothing, Hideshi and his fellow passengers were acting out a kind of play, symbolically leaving material possessions behind as they took passage to the very Gates of Heaven.

  And, of course, their nudity made it easier for the security personnel, who were examining them even now with a ruthless, near-microscopic scrutiny through the array of sensors embedded in the surrounding bulkheads and in the seats to which they were strapped.

  Impassively, Hideshi watched the Great Wheel unfold before him on the vessel's viewall. Tenno Kyuden—the Imperial Palace—was far more splendid, more spectacular than any holo, even than any ViRsimulation could possibly render it.

  In some ways, the Palace reminded him of one of those immense, glittering, crystal-heavy chandeliers that some Western cultures affected in ballrooms or fancy dining halls. It had begun as a simple wheel attached at its hub to the jackstraw-tangled complex of the Singapore Synchorbital station, but in the past few centuries, construction had been unceasing as more and more modules and apartments and Imperial functionary habitats had been added. Now the structure was wider than the largest ryu dragonship and far more massive. Its rotation provided varying levels of spin gravity for the habitats within, the precise acceleration of a given level depending on how far it was from the hub, where it was essentially zero.

  The Wheel's hub was attached to a tangle of zero-gravity structures that zigzagged out along the orbital. The entire complex was positioned at the synchorbit slot above Earth's Singapore Sky-el, the slender elevator tower that connected the island of Palau Linggae on the equator, located just south of Singapore, with that spot in orbit some 36,000 kilometers directly overhead where orbital period precisely matched Earth's twenty-four-hour rotation.

  Moments before, the pod had left the main sky-el receiving bay and was drifting now across open space toward the Wheel's hub.

  "Pod Swan's Flight, this is Palace of Heaven Approach Control," a voice said softly inside his head, speaking through his cephlink. "Passenger One. Verify, please, your identity."

  Hideshi gave a single sharp, precisely military nod. "Hai. Rear Admiral Isoru Hideshi, of the Imperial carrier Soraryu. I open myself to your inspection."

  He could feel the cold fingers of a security observer aboard the Palace probing his cephlink, then pushing through the nanotechnically grown circuitry to his personal RAM, opening files, extracting data, examining, comparing

  Such stringent security safeguards were necessary, of course, and Isoru accepted them without reservation. His career, no, his entire life had been dedicated to the Empire and to the ideal of the god-Emperor, and the Emperor's safety was of paramount importance. The shuttle was one of a small fleet of service and orbital transport vehicles kept at Singapore Synchorbital for the sole purpose of carrying visitors to and from the Imperial Palace. Passengers aboard those shuttles, as well as on the handful of tube shuttles that connected the hub of the Great Wheel with the rest of the Synchorbital, could be meticulously scrutinized during their approach. Any deviation from the expected, any suspicious shadow picked up within his body by the X-ray and infra-sound scanners, any change in the arrays of data stacked within his personal RAM, and he would be immediately apprehended by the army of security personnel waiting within the Palace. If the threat were deemed serious enough, he would be cut down before docking by one of the remote lasers mounted in the bulkheads . . . or if the threat were more serious still, the pod could be detonated long before it was close enough to be a threat to the Palace or the person of the god-Emperor.

  Hideshi cast a wary eye on his naked companions. One of the men was Captain Shigeru Ushiba, his chief aide, but the other four were strangers to him. He hoped he wasn't about to be vaporized because one of them was detected carrying a bomb in his or her abdominal cavity.

  Evidently, he was not. "Thank you, Admiral," the voice said in his mind. "You and your companions are clear to approach the Palace of Heaven."

  The pod slowed as the Great Wheel expanded to fill the viewall, then grew larger still, until he could make out individual windows and lights gleaming in the vast structure's shadowed recesses. Riding a magnetic beam, the pod was drawn smoothly toward a brightly lit docking collar mounted on a non-rotating portion of the hub. Pod melded with collar in a barely felt surge of deceleration that dwindled almost immediately to the endless fall of weightlessness, and in the soundless flurry of nanotechnics welding the two seamlessly together. In another moment, a pinpoint hole appeared in one of the pod's bulkheads, widening swiftly as the hull material dissolved.

  As the last of the bulkhead evaporated, a line of armored Imperial Marines on the far side snapped to attention—a difficult parade-ground maneuver for men lightly anchored by magnetic boots in the hub's microgravity environment—and a brightly robed Shinto priest gestured benediction. Six acrobatic annaigakari, passenger handlers trained in maneuvering themselves and others in microgravity, swam into the pod's cabin and began unlocking the safety restraints—yet another security measure. The red-coveralled handlers carried the passengers one by one into the receiving bay's interior, where they were scanned once again by low-intensity, broad-fanned lasers that measured and patterned every square centimeter of their skin.

  Most of the new security precautions, Hideshi mused as the blue beam hummed and drew its glowing line slowly across his body, had been introduced within the last two years. There'd been a time, before that damnable Confederation raid on Kasei in 2569, when Tenno Kyuden had been just another orbital facility, and security precautions had been limited to palming your ident and downloading your business into an Al-monitored computer at a manned checkpoint.

  Kasei—the terraformed world once known as Mars—was the site of an important research facility. Confederation raiders had penetrated the security
of the Pavonis Mons Synchorbital and compromised the entire planetary tracking and defense network long enough for Confederation warstriders to land near the research station at Noctis Labyrinthus Bay and hijack its most important secret, a prototype of the new interstellar communications system. The TJK, Imperial Security, discovered that the saboteurs who'd penetrated the Planetary Defense Network had done so through the agency of Naga isoro, parasites. The Naga fragments used so extensively in the Confederation could actually rework skin, muscle, and bone to completely change a person's looks. Both by centuries-old tradition and by Imperial law, gaijin—foreigners—weren't even permitted to set foot on Kasei or its synchorbital, yet the enemy agents had disguised themselves so effectively as Nihonjin that they'd slipped through the place's security barriers completely undetected. As a result, the Empire's new and highly secret faster-than-light communications system had been stolen from under the Fleet's nose, along with the best chance the Empire had possessed to crush once and for all the rebellious outer provinces and return them to their proper place within the circle of Empire and Hegemony.

  No wonder Imperial Security had become just a trifle paranoid about the Tenno Kyuden in the two years since the Kasei outrage. The elaborate scanning and screening procedures were designed to sniff out gaijin wearing Nihonjin men; if the enemy were able to slip, say, a small fission device aboard Tenno Kyuden, hidden in the belly of what seemed to be an honest Nihonjin businessman, the blow to the Empire would be incalculable. Worse even than the loss of the Imperial Military Command Staff, which maintained its offices here, would be the loss of face to the entire Empire, especially if the Emperor himself were killed or wounded.

  Yes, a little nudity and discomfort could be tolerated in the face of such stakes as these.

  The scanning laser snapped off, and a door dematerialized. A Palace attendent floated through, managing to bow almost double from the waist as she extended a transparent package containing a folded, pale gray garment. "Dozo," she said. "Please accept this small token, O-Shoshosan."

  "Hai," he replied curtly. "Domo arigato."

  The garment began as a bulky, one-piece jumper with the consistency of paper, but by the time he pulled the trim tabs snug at either hip, the nanotechnics within the weave had tailored it into a snug-fitting Imperial Navy uniform, full dress, space-black in color, complete with boots and the appropriate ribbons and awards on his breast. Ushiba entered, carrying two small personal computers, one of which he handed to his commanding officer.

  "Thank you, Shigeru," Hideshi said. "I'm glad the prohibition against personal weapons does not extend to these, ne?"

  "Hai, Shoshosan," his aide replied with a smile and a bow. "Though, as you frequently remind me, information is the deadliest weapon of all."

  The admiral chuckled. "Best not to speak of weapons here, Taisasan," he said. "The bulkheads here have ears, quite literally. We don't want to make our hosts nervous, do we?"

  "No, Shoshosan."

  Hideshi raised his voice slightly. "We are ready to attend the Lord Munimori, at his convenience, of course."

  Two more annaigakari floated into the room, bowed, then turned to lead the way to Munimori's office suite. Since both Hideshi and his aide had long experience in space, the annaigakari didn't offer to carry them like so many parcels, and the admiral was grateful for the small concession to his pride.

  They boarded an elevator pod that carried them swiftly and soundlessly from the hub to the outermost station ring, where spin gravity was maintained at a constant one G. The landscape was mingled green parkland, gardens, and the close-clustered buildings of densely structured cities, many done in traditional architectural styles that brought to mind parts of Kyoto or Osaka, all beneath a sky of slatted mirrors, admitting sunlight from outside. This corridor, with a permanent population of over 800,000—all in government or military service—was known with good reason as the Circle of Heaven. It was a place now more space colony than space station, a miniature world where spin-gravity gave the feeling of walking on a full-sized world, but where the horizons were sharply constrained and seemed to curve up and out of sight where one's gaze followed the arc of the Great Wheel.

  Hideshi felt lost . . . as though he'd just been dumped on the surface of a strange world. Before either he or his aide could lose face, however, a captain with the aiguillettes of the Imperial Staff met them at the elevator terminus; a ten-minute trip in a maglev transport whisked them soundlessly around the ring's curve to Munimori's private residence. The place was low and modern, an understated bit of Imperial Minimalist architecture built into the side of a hill overlooking the Circle of Heaven. At the door to the atrium, they removed their boots, handing them over to a house servant with a stiff bow. "The general is waiting for you, honored sirs," the servant—a young, nude, pale-skinned genie—said with a deeper, answering bow. "Please, if you would follow me."

  They were led through several traditionally furnished rooms. The last was a paper-walled anteroom dominated by a perfectly matched pair of inochi-zo, the lovingly crafted, silently writhing life-sculptures that embodied—depending on the genetics of their design—purest and unending agony or purest and unending bliss. The eyes of the pain-inochi-zo followed them in silent pleading as they walked through the low doorway and into Munimori's private sanctum; those of the pleasure statue were closed and unheeding.

  Stepping through the opposite doorway, they entered a formal garden, a peacefully contemplative bit of Zen artistry, the simplicity of rocks, moss, and gravel calling to mind mountains, forest, and sea—a world in miniature echoing the larger world of curved horizons beyond the vine-covered wall. Fleet Admiral Munimori was there, clad in a light, silk robe. The slave announced the guests, bowed low, and vanished.

  "Konichiwa, O-Gensuisama," Hideshi said, bowing. Ushiba bowed as well but remained silent, as was proper. "We have come at your order."

  "Thank you, Admiral," Munimori replied. He was an extremely large man, nearly as broad in girth as a sumo wrestler and just as stockily muscular. He was holding a small scroll open as he sat cross-legged on a reed tatami. "It was good of you to come."

  "I am honored at the invitation, Gensuisama."

  "Please, be seated. I will summon tea."

  Hideshi bowed thanks and acceptance.

  "And how are things at New America, Shoshosan?"

  "As chaotic as ever, my Lord Admiral. The Confederates continue to show an astonishing inability to work together toward a common goal."

  "So."

  "Their command structure is disorganized, and the individual fleet components cannot even work with one another, much less with the Imperial Fleet. Last week there was an ugly incident in Jefferson, New America's capital, between the crew members of a destroyer from Liberty and a cruiser from New America. I gather that several men ended up in a local hospital, and a spaceport bar was reduced to splintered furniture and shattered crockery."

  In quiet, measured tones, Hideshi continued delivering his verbal report, relying on his RAM for most of the details and only once falling back on his computer, which maintained a data link with the main computer aboard Soraryu, docked at the Synchorbital. Unnervingly, Munimori continued to study the scroll, which appeared to be a collection of haiku by the twenty-second-century poet Hagiwara. Occasionally, the fleet admiral's eyes would flicker toward Hideshi as he spoke, but outside of the occasional noncommittal grunt or "so," he said nothing. That was deliberate, of course; if any part of Operation Shoki went wrong, Munimori would save both men and peace of mind knowing that he'd neither publicly praised nor officially condemned the idea.

  A nude, female servant appeared, a genie with long, silver-blond hair and downcast eyes, bearing tea on an antique lacquered tray. For a time, business was interrupted by polite and soft-spoken pleasantries. It was not the ritual of the full tea ceremony, of course, but there were the civilized amenities to observe.

  "Our agents report everywhere the same," Hideshi concluded. "Confederation society
and technology are changing rapidly, and the pace of that change is accelerating. Our Fleet sociologists believe that within seventy years, if things continue at this pace, the biotechnical gulf between the Frontier and the Imperial core worlds will have become uncrossable. This poses a grave danger to the future security of the Empire."

  "This is so." Munimori was silent for a time. He appeared to be in thought, and Hideshi elected to remain silent as well, rather than risk interrupting him. His report was nearly complete in any case.

  "Often," Munimori said after another long pause, "the old ways, the conservative ways, are best. Too often, people rush forward blindly, embracing new ways, new technologies, new . . . things before those things are fully understood. Ne?"

  "Hai, Gensuisama."

  "I do not trust those who embrace this so-called new biotechnology. The introduction of alien parasites into one's own being . . . this lessens that which is human."

  "Operation Shoki," Hideshi said carefully, "will ensure that humanity remains human, Gensuisama. All is in readiness."

  "How do you like your new command, Admiral?"

  "I was . . . most honored to receive this command, Gensuisama. Soraryu is an excellent ship, with a good crew. The squadron is well-trained and responsive. I have no doubts about their abilities."

  "That is good." Without another word, Munimori picked up the scroll of haiku and began reading from it again. Seconds later, Hideshi felt a presence at his elbow; a servant had appeared, called silently by Munimori's cephlink. The interview was over.

  Hideshi was somewhat troubled as he left the admiral's quarters. No specific orders had been given, but within the framework of custom and haragei, a word poorly translated as visceral communication—speaking without words—Mu-nimori had told him precisely what he wanted done. Execute Operation Shoki.

  It would be war.

  He felt a pounding excitement in his breast. With luck, Isoru Hideshi might earn for himself a place in the ViRhistory documentaries as the man who reconquered the Confederation for the Empire.