Rebellion (31 page)

Leaderless, the militia forces lost all coordination. Some fled for the Sinai Heights beyond the town, where snipers were keeping up a steady fire on the advancing legger marines. Others bolted for the wide-open cargo locks in the city dome, and were still struggling to crowd in when laser fire began slashing through them from behind. A pair of Starhawk missiles, teleoperated from the Katanas that had launched them, struck the side of the Tanis city dome and detonated with twin, savage thunderclaps. The city’s air began shrieking out into the thinner Eriduan atmosphere, raising a howling vortex of swirling sand and dust. The air pressure in Tanis began dropping, though it would be hours yet before outer and inner pressures matched and the windstorm stopped.

Legger marines, supported by Tanto and Tachi war-striders, broke into small strike groups, deploying swiftly across open ground to targets already mapped and loaded into tactical operations memory. One team seized the mono rail head and the pressurized station lock, where civilians were still crowding aboard a three-car train. Striker missiles breached the station walls, while flamers took care of the screaming, frantic
minshu.

Other teams secured the mining facilities and the domes housing the separator and processing plants, although, because of the demonstration in the Tanis town square, there were only a handful of workers present, and none of them were armed. All were rounded up without incident and herded into an airlock “for safekeeping.” Opening the outer lock door eliminated the need for keeping them under guard, as marines proceeded to secure the plants and their equipment.

But the real slaughter occurred inside Tanis proper.

Gunso
Isamu Kimaya was not proud of what he was doing, but he was determined to carry out his orders with a true samurai’s devotion to duty because to do less would dishonor him and the Imperial
daihyo
who had issued them. He was glad, though, that he and his
sensono kyodai,
his war-brothers, had been ordered to drop the black-hulled livery of the Obake Regiment, that they were not displaying the regiment’s white-on-black
sashimono.

He’d guided his KY-1180 Tachi through the gaping rent in the town dome, formed up with the rest of his section, then advanced into the town square. His dorsal turret with its twin Toshiba 88-MW lasers panned back and forth, killing lone targets and using them to set buildings on fire. For the dense crowds of people stampeding ahead of his advance, he used a different weapon, the
sempu.

The word meant “whirlwind,” though that hardly described the thing in action. Heavy-caliber shells fired from his Tachi’s Mark III weapons packs exploded as they cleared the stubby muzzles, hurling a cluster of lead balls at the targets with a shotgun’s dispersal pattern. Unlike shotgun pellets, however, these balls were strung together by several meters of monofilament, molecule-thin wire that sliced through light armor, cloth, breather packs, flesh, and bone alike with appallingly bloody ease.

In places the dead—and the neatly sectioned body parts of the dead—were piled up four and five deep, especially in the killing fields around airlocks and building entrances, and blood was ankle-deep on the legger marines moving across some of the sunken walkways. Flamers designed to incinerate Xenophobe Gammas worked equally well on flesh. Long before the air thinned to the point where humans could not have breathed it, the dome’s atmosphere was choked by foul, low-hanging clouds of greasy smoke.

Kimaya used his machine guns to cut down a man and a woman fleeing together, then waded forward through a wall of bodies. Rigidly, employing every
kokorodo
discipline at his command, he held his emotions in check. In a way, the high-tech linkage of the individual marine striders helped. Under infrared imaging, with computer targeting interlock, the fleeing
minshu
were reduced to rapidly scattering patterns of colored light, faceless save for gaping holes that might be screaming mouths, nonhuman targets no more meaningful than the robotic
ningyo
used in training exercises. Calls over the tactical frequency heightened the practice-exercise feel of the situation.

“Red Three, Red Three! Come left ten meters. Maintain your spacing.”

“Green Five, targeting at three-one-five, range two hundred meters.”

“Orange Two, stand clear. I am employing whirlwind.”

“I think some targets have moved behind the building on theleft.”

“Nagumo! Sato! Neutralize that threat!”

“I have a lock. Stand by. Target neutralized.”

Still, he did not feel good. The slaughter seemed to take forever, as Imperial warstriders dispersed through the city. Building after building was set ablaze. Honored ancestors! He’d not given thought to the possibility that there were women and children in here!

“Red Leader, this is Red Two. Objective secured.”

“Affirmative.Red Two. Proceed to objective Blossom Four.”

“Yoshitomi! Take your squad and check those buildings on the left!”

He had his Tachi’s recorders on, of course, and was able to let the strider’s AI capture the images he’d been told to get. Why were his superiors so interested in the details of this butchery, he wondered?

Movement captured his attention and he swung to the left. A civilian was approaching the Tachi, a breather mask over his face, a white rag waving in his right hand. He was shouting something, and Kimaya cut in his strider’s external mikes to hear what he was saying.

“Hanashi-o tsuzuke-yo!”
the man called.
“Hanashi-o tsuzuke-yo!”

The words made no sense. “Let us continue to talk”? The man was repeating the phrase over and over, and it occurred to Kimaya that it sounded like a code phrase, maybe a password of some sort.

But the man was
gaijin
and Kimaya had been given no passwords or special authorizations beyond the call signs of the assault group. His orders were to take no prisoners. With a twitch of what, in his physical body, would have been his left hand, he depressed his left-side Mark III weapons pack and triggered a single
sempu
blast. The
gaijin
fragmented into a dozen neatly sliced pieces, the face on the severed head still showing shocked surprise as it wetly plopped to the ground.

Gods, there was so much blood.…

“My God, what are they doing?”

“The bastards!The filthy, goking
bastards!”

“Shut up, people! Stay low!”

Jamis Mattingly was huddled beneath a dun-colored thermal blanket with a dozen other people, peering miserably through his mask’s dust-coated visor at the scene below. He and most of his staff had escaped through the mining tunnels and access shafts scant minutes after the Imperial Marines had grounded. Now he was hidden among the rocks high up in the rugged Sinai, using the thermal blankets to mask their body heat signatures from aircraft. Grim-faced militiamen crouched among the rocks nearby, watching with stony, emotionless eyes as the Imperial Marines completed the destruction of Tanis.

There was no question whatsoever about the identity of the attackers. Mattingly was a former warstrider; he’d jacked Ghostriders with the Scots Greys on Caledon before emigrating to Eridu and becoming a fusion plant manager, and he knew all of the Imperial designs. This had been a marine op, a show of raw terror and naked force designed to… to what? He didn’t think the marines were taking prisoners. Damn it, he wasn’t conceited enough to think that the Impies were so eager for his head that they’d zero an entire town to get it. They must have a reason… but what was it?

There were scattered reports of other survivors, some in the forest, others in the tunnels below. A number of people had fled in magflitters as soon as young Kleinst had arrived with his terrifying news. With luck, they might reach some of the neighboring Euphrates Valley towns and spread the alarm.

A dull thud sounded from the town dome… followed by another. They were blowing things up in there, it sounded like. Many of the warstriders were already pulling out, clambering back aboard the waiting transports.

Overhead, the ground support craft circled like vultures.

“Why are they doing this!” a man screamed, his voice muffled by his breather mask but shrill and far too loud. “Why can’t they leave us alone?”

“Quiet, Franz,” a woman replied harshly. “Quiet or I’ll shut you up myself.”

On the whole, discipline was good, their chances of survival fair… unless those Imperial troops decided to comb the Sinai Heights boulder by boulder.

No… the ground troops were also withdrawing, moving back to the transports at a trot. Their ammunition and armored suit power must be running low. Tanis lay silent, the
interior of its transparent transplas dome obscured by a thick and oily haze.

The biggest question was whether help would come. Their life support packs had air for two hours or so… less after the rugged climb through the tunnels. If no one got here from Sidon or Memphis, they would all be as dead as if they’d stayed in Tanis.

No! They
had
to live, so that the other Eriduan communities could know what had happened here! If he had to compose a RAM message, download it to a volunteer, then give up his own life support pack to guarantee the messenger’s survival, he would do it.

With a black-humored stab of irony, Mattingly realized that he and the other survivors were witnessing history in the making. Once word began spreading among the other dome communities on Eridu, the Tanis Massacre would become immortalized, the first armed clash of the Hegemony Civil War.

And with a passionate, fierce-driven conviction, he knew it would not be the last.

Chapter 26

Mankind will possess incalculable advantages and extraordinary control over human behavior when the scientific investigator will be able to subject his fellow men to the same external analysis he would employ for any natural object, and when the human mind will contemplate itself not from within but from without.

—
Scientific Study of So-called

Psychical Processes in the Higher Animals

Ivan Petrovich Pavlov

C.E.
1906

Dev was linked to his warstrider, moving through streets awash in blood. There were bodies everywhere, bodies twisted like rags, bodies soaked with blood, pieces of bodies that looked like they’d been cleanly diced on some butcher giant’s cutting board, others torn and shredded and burned, their glistening entrails spilled on the ground.

God, there was so much blood.…

He tried to turn his optics away, tried to focus on the burning buildings, on the pall of smoke filling the ruptured dome, but couldn’t. He was searching for survivors, hunting them down as if they were scrabbling, scurrying vermin and executing them with clean and methodical bursts from his weapons.

Movement to his left. He turned, and red targeting brackets closed on the lone human figure stumbling toward him, a white handkerchief clutched in blood-smeared fingers. The man was mouthing something. Dev had shut down his external mikes earlier because the screams of the children had hurt so. He switched them back on now.

“Please! Help me!”
the man was calling.
“Please, help me!”

But Dev’s orders said…

He stopped, trying to recall. His orders had been… had been… to patrol the area around the Tanis mining complex, to watch for Xenophobe activity, to protect the Tanis civilians if the Xenos attacked.…

This, this massacre had been
his
idea.

“Please help me!”

Dev twitched his left arm, and the man fell to pieces, arms and legs, head and slices of torso slipping apart from one another in an explosion of startling scarlet.

Satisfaction.
The
sempu
was a devastating antipersonnel weapon. In his report to HEMILCOM he would have to tell them that it was truly… truly…

Dev tried to move, tried to shake his head in outraged denial, but his brain no longer controlled his body. Dimly, he knew that someone else had taken over that task, as data continued to trickle in through his sockets, filling his cephlink with images of sheer, bloody horror.

“Why did you do it, Cameron? We saw you do it, and we have the recorder memories from your strider. What made you do it?”

“I… I didn’t… what you said… I couldn’t—”

“You ordered your company to destroy Tanis. Eighteen hundred helpless civilians massacred, the town dome cracked wide open. Do you know what happens to people forced to breathe Eridu’s atmosphere? We’ll show you.…”

The pictures in Dev’s mind were the stuff of nightmares, but sharpened to a hard, crisp focus that had none of a dream’s sense of unreality, none of the distance or perspective experienced as it faded from memory.

Instead, he experienced the reality of
now
in crisp, vivid detail.

A dozen men and women were on the rubbery, yellow-orange stuff that passed for grass on Eridu, some on their hands and knees, others sprawled with legs and arms twisted, fingers clawing trenches in the earth. Mouths gaping, chests heaving with convulsive shudders, they struggled to breathe the oxygen-poor air, their lips turning blue, their eyes starting from their heads in their frenzied battle against suffocation.

“My orders… my orders…”

“You’re telling us you were just following orders? You killed all those people and you were just following orders?”

“Yes! I mean, no.…”

“What is the real story, Cameron? What is the truth?”

“I don’t know.…”

He didn’t know. He remembered approaching Tanis with his company. He remembered receiving his orders:
Patrol the area around the Tanis mining complex, watch for Xenophobe activity, protect the Tanis civilians if the Xenos attack.…

No! No! No!
His orders had been something else entirely, but he couldn’t remember… couldn’t remember.…