Rebellion (3 page)

The 5th Loki, the Thorhammers, had originally been raised as a planetary militia, the 2nd New American Minutemen, and New America was Katya’s homeworld. If she was really leaving Hegemony service, she would probably go back there.

“Away from Earth and the Empire,” Katya said.

“I wish you’d change your mind.”

“And I wish you’d open your eyes, Dev. I wish you’d see what the Empire is, what it’s doing.…”

Dev shook his head slightly, eyes narrowing. Admiral Kodama probably wasn’t in the habit of eavesdropping on his guests, but his hab AI was almost certainly keyed to pick up on certain words or phrases.
Rebellion,
say, or
Empire.
Just to be on the safe side.

“Arts and entertainment,” he said softly, a veiled warning. The so-called civilized pursuits, techno-art and virtual entertainment, were the universally accepted safe topics for casual discussion.

“I’ve said nothing treasonous,” she said, defiant, daring him to say more. “And they don’t own my mind. Not yet. And admit it. The fact that you feel you have to shut me up proves just how bad things are getting—here on Earth, anyway.”

Dev clamped down on an immediate, almost automatic retort. Arguing with Katya here and now would accomplish nothing, save, possibly, getting them a visit tomorrow from Imperial Security. They’d argued politics more than once before, and Dev found the whole subject tiresome. It had been the one source of friction between them since they’d arrived on Earth two months earlier.

He hated to see her leave, but he didn’t want her to make trouble for herself. Earlier, when he’d first called her, he’d been unwilling to see her within the artificial intimacy of a ViRcom. It was on his insistence that she’d come corporally to Kodama’s hab tonight at all. She’d wanted to say good-bye over the ViRcom, but he hadn’t wanted to settle for Katya’s virtual presence. He’d needed to see her, to
touch
her in person.

That was a mistake, he now realized.

“Things really aren’t so bad.”

“Are you saying that for yourself, Dev? Or for your father?”

“Leave him out of it!”

Shosho
Michal Cameron had been an Imperial naval officer, one of only a handful of
gaijin
to be given a slot on the Emperor’s staff. Later, however, in command of an Imperial K-T drive warship, he’d destroyed the sky-el on Lung Chi to keep the Xenophobes from reaching an evacuation fleet at synchorbit, an act that had doomed half a million civilians and five thousand Imperial Marines still on the planet’s surface. The elder Cameron had been disgraced by that action and later had committed suicide. Only recently, after Dev’s encounter with the Xenos at Alya B-V, had he been officially and posthumously rehabilitated.

“You’re wrong about the Empire, you know,” Dev went on, his voice pitched scarcely above a whisper. “Except for the odd insurrection or two, they’ve kept Man at peace for better than three centuries. The Core Worlds are prospering, the Frontier worlds are as free as they can be—”

“Good God, Dev, why don’t you link in and switch on? The Frontier has just as much freedom as the length of the Empire’s leash. They control our trade with Earth and with the other colonies, tax us to death, and tell us we can’t develop our own technological base… ‘for our own good.’ But then, you’re an Earther, aren’t you? Core World. So you wouldn’t understand how we feel on the Frontier.”

“Yeah,” Dev said, his own anger rising. Their arguments had followed this pattern before, and he knew the script. “I’m from Earth and I’m proud of it. I’m also proud to be an Imperial officer.” He touched the starburst at his throat. “I’m proud of
this.”

“Don’t be too proud of that trinket. Remember, I was there too.”

Yes, she’d been there. She’d descended into that pitch-black hole after he’d fallen in, overcoming old, old nightmares of the dark to come after him. She’d loved him once. What had happened to them?

“Katya—”

“Good-bye, Dev,” she said firmly. “We won’t be seeing each other again. Congratulations on your new posting.”

“Uh, thanks. But—”

“And if I catch you and your Imperial friends on New America, you’re dead meat.” She turned sharply at that and walked away. Dev started to go after her, then stopped. It was over. Clearly and definitely, his relationship with Katya was over.

And, like his insisting on seeing her in person, maybe that relationship had been a mistake as well.

Chapter 2

There are those, particularly among the ultra-Green radicals, who hold that Man, as defined by his culture and technology, is no longer entirely human. The focus of their argument, of course, is implant technology.

Consider: nanotechnically grown cephlinks and RAM intracranial implants, palm interfaces and link sockets, have utterly transformed work, entertainment, economics, communication, education, indeed, have revolutionized every aspect of civilization over the past four centuries. The Greens miss a crucial point. Man’s tools may well be the foundational basis for his evolution. The crude, chipped-stone implements of Australopithecus, by improving his diet and encouraging an upright stance, may well have put him solidly on the path to
Homo erectus;
who can today imagine the final destination of the path we have already chosen?

—
Man and His Works

Karl Gunther Fielding

C.E.
2448

Two weeks later, Dev was up-tower at Singapore Orbital, continuing his almost single-handed crusade before the Imperial Staff and the Council of the United Terran Hegemony to implement the plan that had become known as Operation Yunagi. He’d returned to his quarters and downloaded the day’s accumulation of messages from his console. Some small, irrational part of him continued to hope that there’d be a message from Katya, even though she must still be en route to New America.

Travel times between the stars being what they were it would be two months at least before he could expect something from her. New America—26 Draconis IV—was 48.6 light-years from Sol, clear out on the fringe of the Shichiju’s Frontier. Typical travel times for the big liners averaged about a light-year per day, a fast courier carrying mail perhaps twice that, and… well, the numbers spoke for themselves.

Besides, that last time he’d seen her she’d been pretty flat-out definite about not wanting to see him again, ever. He had the room prepare him a drink, which was delivered in a squeeze bottle. One wall was set to show Earth, a cloud-wreathed, three-quarters’ sphere hanging in space. Dev floated in the microgravity of synchorbit, trying to turn his mind from Katya to something productive.

To
Yunagi.

The Nihongo word was a poetic reference to the calm that falls at evening. Operation Yunagi had been Dev’s single-minded pursuit for almost the entire two and a half months since he and Katya had returned from the Alyan expedition. It had been his idea, one he’d first discussed at length with Katya, then later with the Emperor’s military staff. He was the acknowledged expert on the Xenophobes for the simple reason that he’d actually brushed minds with one; a small part of that alien presence was still with him, giving him a unique perspective on the Xenos… and on humans as well.

What had that ViRsim actress said at Kodama’s party? He concentrated for a moment, retrieving the girl’s image and words from his RAM:
I understand that, because of what you did down in that awful cave, the Empire’s won the Xeno war!

No, they hadn’t won yet, but Dev was convinced that Yunagi would make that final victory, that final peace of the evening calm, possible. His thoughts flashed to Katya for a moment, as he wished she could have enjoyed his success… then drew back sharply.
Damn!

Katya’s comment about his father had bitten deep. He didn’t like to admit, even to himself, that the elder Cameron’s unprecedented transfer to the Imperial Navy had had anything to do with his own success. It felt to Dev as though he’d been battling his father’s shadow for a long time now. With the award of the
Teikokuno Hoshi
from the Emperor’s own hand, he’d finally stepped into the sunshine on his own and even managed to make peace with his father’s ghost. Michal Cameron was no longer on the Navy’s lists as a traitor.

Hegemony and Empire. The two together straddled the worlds of Man like a colossus. Imperial Nihon ruled directly a relatively small percentage of Earth’s surface—the home islands, the Philippines, and a scattering of territorial enclaves ranging from the states of the Indian subcontinent to Kamchatka and Vancouver. By puppet governments and the presence of Imperial Marines, they dominated perhaps half the planet beyond those borders, maintaining the
Teikokuno Heiwa,
the Imperial Peace, in such scattered former war zones as central Asia, South China, and Africa.

Japan’s real political presence, however, was expressed through its silent control of the Hegemony, the interstellar government consisting of fifty-two member nations on Earth, plus the seventy-eight colonized worlds in seventy-two star systems that comprised the far-flung Shichiju. Technically autonomous, the extrasolar colonies were overseen—
ruled
was too harsh a word—by governors appointed in Kyoto. Local planetary governments made laws, managed industry, and even maintained armies, the planetary militias, in almost total freedom.

The single restriction lay in the Hegemony’s control of trade and travel between the stars and of the technology that made such travel possible. Only Hegemonic and Imperial ships possessed the K-T drives that let them cruise the
Kamisama no Taiyo,
the “Ocean of God” that reduced to days or months voyages that otherwise would have taken decades or centuries.

Katya, Dev knew, saw Japan’s monopoly on space-based technology and trade as tyranny, its taxes on colonial industries as crippling, its veto power over Hegemony affairs as nothing less than absolute dictatorship. For Dev, the system had its faults but it possessed one notable advantage: it
worked.
Until the first of the Xenophobe incursions, the Japanese had kept the peace for three centuries, save for a few inevitable isolated uprisings and the odd minor rebellion. By retaining sole control of nuclear weaponry they’d kept a fragmented humanity from destroying itself. And for the past forty years, they’d coordinated the Shichiju’s defense against the Xenophobes, succeeding—usually—where the scattered response of dozens of frontier worlds would certainly have failed.

On the other hand, he understood Katya’s bitterness toward the Shichiju’s masters even if he didn’t fully share the feeling himself. Certainly, some individual freedoms were restricted under the Imperial Peace. Citizens of the former United States in particular had long traditions of domestic independence that had been sharply curtailed by the Hegemonic Act of Union three centuries before, and in some areas bitterness against Imperial Japan still ran surprisingly deep. There’d been some ugly incidents; the Vancouver Massacre of ’21 and the Metrochicagan Riots were still fresh in most Americans’ minds.

Those attitudes had spread to the half dozen or so worlds of the Shichiju where colonists of American descent had tried to resurrect some measure of their imagined past glories. Worlds like New America, Katya’s homeworld. She might have been raised in that planet’s Ukrainian colony, but she’d obviously been infected by the positively ancient, conservative atmosphere of the place.

All things considered, Dev thought, the Empire was at worst a cumbersome and unwieldy bureaucracy, but at best the instrumentality that had made Man’s outreach to the stars, even his very survival, possible. In his firm opinion it was both. For him and his family, the Empire had long been both blessing and curse.

To begin with, Michal Cameron had been forced to divorce his wife when he won his appointment to the Imperial Navy. Command officers, those ranking captain and above, were expected to marry for political advantage and to mingle within circles defined by the Imperial Court, and Mary Jean Pruitt-Cameron—a
gaijin
girl from West Scranton who couldn’t even speak Nihongo—simply hadn’t been of the proper social class. A new marriage had been arranged for Michal by the Emperor’s Council of Protocol.

Even so, Michal had been allowed to retain his former wife as mistress, and he’d been able to provide for his two sons. Dev would never have been able otherwise to acquire his hardware, an NOI Model 10,000 Cephimplant, with left-palm-embedded control interface, twin temporal sockets, and a cervical receiver for direct feedback work.

Without those high-priced C- and T-sockets, Dev Cameron would never have shaken free of Earth or the Hegemony Protectorate Arcology. He would have been just another of the hundred million BosWash citizens plugged into recjack feeds and living on the
Fukushi
dole, the welfare handouts provided by the government to its unemployable citizens.

After his father’s disgrace and suicide, Dev had nursed a black bitterness toward the Empire, but he’d not been able to maintain such personal hatred toward so large and impersonal a system for long. From Dev’s point of view, it was his father’s enemies who had rigged the court-martial’s outcome, not the system. The Empire was far, far larger than any individual citizen, larger even than the Emperor himself.

His father’s disgrace had very nearly ended his own career as well, and before it was properly started. He’d already received his appointment to the Hegemonic Naval Academy at Singapore when word of the Lung Chi disaster reached Earth, and the appointment had been quietly revoked after the court-martial, “to avoid unfortunate repercussions to the Academy’s reputation.” Ultimately, Dev had taken working passage aboard the freighter
Mintaka
to the Frontier just to escape the onus of his father’s name, but that could hardly be blamed on the Empire, could it?

Nor was it the Empire’s fault that, after joining the Hegemony Guard on Loki, he’d been selected, not for ship training as he’d requested, but as a striderjack.