Jackers

by William H. Keith

  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+2° 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 Herc 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 massive, 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.

  Those estimates had never been realized. In 2515, Xenophobes had emerged from underground, destroying the settlements of Tiryns and Hylas some eight hundred kilometers north of Argos. The Xenos had not been well understood at the time; it was thought they were part of an invasion force, landed by a fleet of starships somehow rendered invisible to the Hegemony’s orbital detectors. The true nature of the threat, that Xeno travel and combat modes were fragments of a titanic, amorphous, single organism dwelling within the interstices of layered rock far beneath the surface, a creature that had been living there for some unknown thousands or millions of years, had not been uncovered until the Alyan Expedition of 2541. While the Imperial Navy concentrated on guarding the approaches to the planet from orbit, a single Imperial Marine battalion and two companies of the 62nd Hegemony Infantry had attempted to protect the capital at Argos.

  Ultimately, as “The Ballad of Morgan’s Hold” recorded, the attempt had failed. Herakles was evacuated, the last of the colony’s defenders dead or escaped up the sky-el to synchorbit. In the twenty-eight years since the planet had been abandoned, no human had set foot on the former colony world; Herakles was once again a dead world, save for the Xenophobe victor.

  The passage from 26 Draconis to Mu Herculis took forty days. Twice, en route, the fields bearing Eagle’s frail hull down that long, glowing corridor of otherness that was the godsea failed, dropping them abruptly once again into fourspace. Each time, the repairs grew trickier, more delicate, and more clever. Soon, Dev thought glumly, the battered vessel would be held together by little more than spit and good wishes, and only a miracle would serve to boost her straining fusion plants to producing output enough to achieve the mass implosion that generated paired singularities.

  By the time Eagle approached the Mu Herculis system, the people aboard little resembled high-ranking military officers and VIPs. A starship’s single most pressing problem within the K-T plenum was getting rid of excess heat, and despite every effort of the vessel’s hard-pressed air-conditioning and cooling systems, the temperatures in her crowded passageways hovered near fifty Celsius, and the passengers, stripped to bare skin or to an absolute minimum of clothing, lolled on the dripping mattresses that took up every square meter of free deck space, soaked in sweat.

  Captain Anders had extended the destroyer’s habitat modules and spun the ship, creating a half G of artificial gravity as one token of comfort for the passengers. There was water enough for all, fortunately, and more could be manufactured easily enough through molecular factories programmed to recycle urine and wash water, and to add to the stores as needed by separating oxygen from carbon dioxide and mixing it with hydrogen drawn from one of the reaction mass tanks. Of more critical concern was food. Eagle had originally departed for Athena with a crew of 318 and food stores enough to last them five months. Her voyage to the Daikoku shipyards and back had lasted a bit more than two of those months, and now she was making another voyage of forty days’ duration with two-thirds more people crammed aboard, and no promise of fresh supplies once they finally reached Mu Herculis. Dev had ordered that everyone go on half rations, including the nutrient feeds to linked personne
l, in order to extend their food supplies for as long as possible.

  Dev could not feel the heat when he was linked, nor was he aware of hunger, since the link module short-circuited all purely physical sensations of discomfort. He was riding the jacks as Eagle dropped out of the K-T plenum, emerging on the fringes of the Mu Herculis system. A full shift of one hundred starship crewmen were jacked in and ready. No one knew what to expect.

  It had been some seventy-eight days since Dev had ordered Captain Curtis to bring the Confederation squadron here from Athena. With a voyage of just under nine and a half light-years from Athena to Mu Herculis, Curtis and the others should have arrived in-system over two months ago, the Transluxus and the other ships from New America shortly after.

  Were the Imperials truly gone from Mu Herc, or had they left sentries on guard? It was possible that Eagle would emerge in the system, only to find the fleet from Athena destroyed or scattered, the Transluxus and her passengers captured two months before. There was no way of knowing until Eagle emerged in normal space.

  Then, moments after the godsea had given way to the velvet black of space and the brilliant, gold-gleaming radiance of Mu Herc A, Dev heard the mournful flutter of a comm beacon, the signal feeding through Eagle’s scanner suite. The code it carried was that agreed upon with Curtis and the others at Athena, meaning that all was well, that the Imperium was not in residence here.

  “Pass the word,” Dev announced over the link intercom as he heard the signal. “We’re home.”

  Linked, he couldn’t hear the cheers, or his passengers’ sobs of relief.

  Days later, Eagle slipped into orbit around Herakles, taking up position alongside Transluxus and the other New American ships. Direct laser communications with Tarazed confirmed what the automatic beacon had already revealed, that there was no Imperial presence in this system, not even so much as an AI-manned watch satellite. From orbit, Herakles was a glorious sight, vast, violet oceans rimmed with gold, with swirls of cloud gloriously reflecting the rich, warm light of the sun. A Typhoon took Dev, Katya, and Sinclair down to a landing zone already staked out on the crest of Mount Athos. The senior squadron officers were waiting for them as they debarked.

  “Welcome to Herakles, General!” Captain Jase Curtis exclaimed, advancing on them. “I gather you brought half the Confederation army with you.”

  “Well, not quite half,” Sinclair admitted, grinning. “It just seemed like that crammed in cheek by jowl aboard that damned destroyer. How’ve you folks been getting on with Congress?”

  “Oh, the politicians?” Commander Ann Petruccio said, grinning. “We shot them the first day.…”

  “Don’t listen to her, General,” Captain Strong said, laughing. “We didn’t want to bring them down until we knew where we stood with the local Xeno. We have them more or less happily roosting in the el.”

  “Right,” Curtis said. “We wave at them each time they pass over.”

  As with most established colony worlds in the Shichiju, a sky-el space elevator had extended from the planet’s equator to synchorbit and beyond, a titanic, spun-diacarb filament tens of meters thick and over thirty thousand kilometers tall. Argos, the capital, had grown up around the towerdown. In 2515, as Xeno combat modules swarmed up into the capital from underground, a five-hundred-megaton fusion device had vaporized Argos. Burned off at its planetary end, the sky-el had been launched free, its delicately engineered balance between world and orbit broken.

  The entire, forty-thousand-kilometer length of the space elevator, all but the lower reaches of the structure that had been vaporized in the Argos blast, had been flung by its own orbital tension into a higher, slower orbit. Spinning now ponderously end for end, the sky-el still circled Herakles in a broad, elliptical orbit, though expert AI calculations indicated that the orbit was not permanent and would decay within a century or two. Each return to perigee sent one end of the enormous structure dipping briefly into Herakles’s atmosphere, and though it had considerable mass—and therefore, inertia—each passage slowed it marginally, gradually hastening the day when it would impact, with spectacular and pyrotechnic fury, on the planet’s surface.

  “The Imperials maintained an outpost here for a good fifteen years after the evacuation,” Curtis explained, “and they used the free sky-el as their base. I put some of my people aboard as soon as we made orbit. Herakles Synchorbital suffered some damage when the elevator broke free, but it’s still airtight. There’s a large habitat at the half-G level, plenty of office space, power from a small fusion plant. The AI is working. Weapons systems’re shut down, but those can be brought on-line with some work.”

  “How about deep space scans?” Dev asked. “Communications, that sort of thing?”

  “No scans. The synchorbital’s sensors weren’t equipped to handle a spin like that, though we might be able to cobble something together after a while. I have most of my engineering people at work now setting up grav detectors. Communications are no problem.”

  “And your planet-side base?”

  Curtis pointed to a cluster of survival domes among the rocks and crags farther up the mountain slope. “That’s it. Dome sweet dome. We’re keeping things small… again until we know whether or not the Xeno’s going to try to eat us. We’re getting all we need from the sky-el, actually. There’s still quite a bit of food up there—mostly stabilized nanoform—so we have plenty to eat. And the nano programmers are working. We’ll be able to grow most of what we need.”

  “We’ll have to keep using the synchorbital as our space station,” Sinclair pointed out. “At least until we can arrange for something better. And I suggest we get people to working on the orbital lasers right away. We’re going to need them, sooner or later.”

  “How long do you think we have, General?” Petruccio wanted to know.

  “I wish I could tell you that, Commander. I really do. It depends on how bright our friend Kawashima is… and while I was on New America, he struck me as very bright indeed.

  “We have one advantage working for us,” Sinclair continued. “If we can get our orbital detectors set up and working, we’ll have advance warning if the Imperials arrive. With a star as massive as Mu Herculis A, they won’t be dropping into fourspace closer than a couple of astronomical units. As at New America, we’ll have plenty of time to reboard our ships and haul Gs for deep space.”

  A starship’s drive drew energy from K-T space by utilizing large quantities of energy from the ship’s fusion plant and converting it to mass in the time-honored give-and-take equivalency of E=mc2. That mass manifested itself as twin microsingularities, a pair of neutron-sized black holes circling one another in mutual and precisely tuned harmonic resonance. That resonance served as a kind of dual gateway, a channel for the incredible energies freely available beyond the K-T barrier, and a hyperdimensional path for the starship itself as it plunged into the faster-than-light realm of the godsea.

  The microsingularities, of course, generated intense gravitational fields, though these were so tiny that their effects were not felt more than a very few meters beyond the drive containment fields. By the same token, however, the precisely tuned balance between the two singularities was extremely sensitive to the curvature of local space. Summoning those twin, captive demons too deeply with the gravity well of world or sun invited disaster. The energy channeling through from the godsea might be closed off as the black holes evaporated, but it was also possible for the energy flow to cascade wildly, generating an unstoppable avalanche of power.

  “And the Naga?” Dev asked. “Have you seen anything of it?”

  “In two months,” Petruccio said with a shrug, “there hasn’t been one damned sign of the Xenos. Not a planetary Naga. Not a traveler. Not a combat module. Not a wisp of nano-D or a positive DSA. Nothing. It’s as though they got tired of waiting and left.”

  Dev glanced at the CO of the Vindemiatrix. She was a tall woman, with a shipjacker’s brush-cut hair and a full, almost stocky figure beneath her freshl
y nano-grown fatigues. “Oh, it’s still here,” Dev said. “You can be sure of that.”

  “Unless Morgan’s people killed it with their bomb,” Curtis said.

  “Unlikely,” Katya put in, “given how big a planetary Naga is.” She looked around, wonder alight in her eyes. “Is this really the site of Morgan’s Hold?”

  “That it is,” Curtis told her. “It’s listed as Mount Athos on the charts and navsims.” He pointed. “We even found some of the 62nd’s old equipment over there. Rusted-out combat rifles, armor, field gear, that sort of thing.” He laughed. “No warstriders, of course.”

  The others laughed as well. That was part of the legend of Morgan’s Hold, that infantry had fought Xenos when the warstriders had abandoned them. There were warstriders in the indicated direction, a Manta, a Fastrider, and a couple of Ghostriders, but those were manned and operative, standing guard over the makeshift landing area. The field area was busy, as ground personnel unloaded the newly grounded aerospace craft.

  “And off that way,” Curtis continued, “that’s the Augean Peninsula, or where it was, anyway. As you can see, it’s mostly underwater now.”

  Dev turned on the hilltop, taking his bearings. That stretch of sundance-glittering ocean was where Argos had stood. Once, the vertical tower of the sky-el must have gleamed golden in the sun right there. And the Xenos, when they came, would have swarmed up the slope from that direction, from the north.…

  Every ground trooper and striderjack in the Shichiju knew the story of Morgan’s Hold. The story had already gone down in legend with other hopeless last stands, with the Alamo, Roarke’s Drift, and Kavalerovo. Garrisoned by one Imperial Marine battalion and two companies of the 62nd Hegemony Infantry—troops dispatched more to keep the peace among the panicky civilians than to attempt to protect them from the still mysterious threat—the planet had been virtually defenseless.