Rebellion (7 page)

The thought steadied her somewhat, but she still felt embarrassed at this naked revelation.

“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, eyes narrowing. “Arts and entertainment,” he said softly.

“I’ve said nothing treasonous,” she snapped back. “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.”

“Things really aren’t so bad.”

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

“Leave him out of it!” He stopped, breathing hard, his face flushed. “You’re wrong about the Empire, you know. 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—”

“That’s quite enough, Katya,” Sinclair’s voice said, breaking in. “More than sufficient. Thank you.”

—
Interrupt
—

Cancel. Return.

She was again in the room on New America, blinking back the tears in her eyes.

“That must have been difficult for you, Katya.” Sinclair spread his arms. “Again, believe me, I’m terribly sorry to put you through that, but I had to be sure. You see, I have a very special need of your services, and we needed to be certain that we could trust you.”

“What services?” Katya demanded. “So far, Mr. Sinclair, we’ve been giving and you’ve been taking. Perhaps now you’d like to tell us what you want of us.”

“It’s ‘General Sinclair,’ actually,” he said a bit stiffly. “And we are fighting a war. Oh, the real shooting hasn’t started, not yet, anyway. I pray God that it never does. But we are fighting for our independence from
Dai Nihon.
More, we are fighting for the chance to be ourselves. This may be the most important struggle our kind has ever faced. At stake is not just the survival of the Constitutionalist movement but the survival of the human species itself.”

“I’m not sure I understand,” Rudi said.

“Diversity,”
Sinclair said, whispering the word as though it were holy. “Our species thrives on diversity. In human society, as in nature, it’s survival of the fittest, with a million failures for every million-and-one experiments. American Independence in 1776. The French Republic. The Bolsheviks and Communism. The Nazis. The American Left Socialists. The Greens. All of them were social experiments of one sort or another. Some succeeded, at least for a time. Others destroyed themselves, top-heavy and slippery with blood. The Hegemony was an experiment too, but for the first time it’s an experiment with all of Mankind’s eggs in one small basket. If
it
fails…” He raised a hand, then let it fall.

“Ancient Greece became the beacon for Western civilization,” Sinclair continued. “Why? The separate city-states—Athens, Sparta, Corinth, a hundred others—each evolved on its own, isolated from the others by the mountains that divided their tiny peninsula. When exchanges between the city-states began, new ideas took root, new ways of looking at the world were discovered. Democracy. Atomic theory. Heliocentrism. It was a golden age that touches our lives even today.

“The move into space should have opened the opportunity for social experimentation,” Sinclair said. “In a way, it may be unfortunate that we stumbled across the K-T drive so soon. Maybe, if we’d had a few thousand years of developing separate societies in separate, scattered worlds and planetoids, each with its own vision of what makes life worth living…” He shrugged. “But it didn’t happen that way. And now the Hegemony is directing our cultural evolution, and with a damned heavy hand. Our lords care less for their colonies than they do for the means of exploiting them. We have one approved culture, one approved way of doing things. Our growth is stifled by the taxes Kyoto drops on us to pay for feeding the arcologies on Earth. We need to shake loose, find the stars again, and make room for a thousand destinies instead of only one!”

“Won’t all those destinies make for some pretty nasty wars?” Katya wanted to know. “I seem to recall that there was as much fighting between those old Greek city-states as there was cultural exchange.”

“Greece was limited in area, and limited in productivity. We face the challenge of expanding into a Galaxy of four hundred billion stars. I think there will be room for us, in all of our diversity, without resorting to war.”

It was, Katya thought, an optimist’s ViRdrama, a universe of plenty with war obsolete. Somehow, she could not quite believe in it. Man would remain Man, however far he spread.

“In the meantime,” Sinclair said, “I need you. All of you.”

Katya thought she saw where he was going. “Operation Yunagi,” she said. “You’re afraid that if Dev communicates with the Xenos, the Hegemony’ll find a way to use them against you!”

“That’s part of it. My sources tell me that he and at least one DalRiss comel have already been dispatched to Eridu for the attempt.

“So, I have a proposal for you gentlemen and ladies, one that is strictly for volunteers. I and my staff are leaving for Eridu in three days. I would like the eight of you to accompany us. Once there, we’ll join up with the local Network. You can be of invaluable help there, by the way, organizing and training our military forces.

“But more important, I want to assemble an assault team to steal a DalRiss comel, get it to a safe place, and use it to communicate with the Xenos for
our
side.” He waited, smiling expectantly. “Well? What do you say?”

“You,” Katya said quietly and with great deliberation, “are out of your goking mind!”

Chapter 5

Chi Draconis V offers exobiologists special insight into the evolution of life, and special problems as well, for the stellar explosion that transformed the star’s binary companion into a white dwarf must have sterilized the system’s worlds within the past billion years.

Yet life, of bewildering variety and energy, undeniably exists today on Eridu. Togo and Namura (2465) have suggested that the system’s F7 sun, coupled with the world’s slow rotation, introduced sufficient cyclical variations in temperature to favor the evolution of complex life from prebiotic compounds that fortuitously survived that early holocaust. Even so, Eridu remains a testimony to the native stubbornness and tenacity of Life, wherever in the universe it may be found.

—
Dawnings: A Survey of Evolutions

Dr. Ella Grant Walker

C.E.
2488

Dawnings
was one of the twelve books in
Hayai’s
tiny shipboard library, and Dev read it through three times during the passage to Chi Draconis. He paid particular attention to Walker’s chapter on Eridu.

Nothing he read, however, explained the Eriduan colonists’ determination to keep the Hegemony Colonial Authority from redesigning their planet. The Universal Lifers and the greenies were a tiny minority, and the workers whose livelihoods would be affected by terraforming the planet had been promised retraining, even relocation. Perhaps, after all, it was as Tokuyama had said: “Some people are
baka.”

For Dev, the two-week flight had passed with relative ease. There was plenty of technical data on hand, both in
Hayai’s
library and through linkage with the ship’s AI. Better still, once Tokuyama had been willing to let Dev look on through the navsim as the courier’s helmsman threaded the little ship through the blue-glowing storm of the Quantum Sea. It had been a long time since Dev had ridden the currents of the
Kamisama no Taiyo,
the godsea of quantum space. He wasn’t allowed to patch in his C-socket and interface with the ship’s drives, of course; he could do no more than watch as the blue-white glory of the K-T plenum exploded past his senses, but it reminded him again of his old dream of being a starpilot, a whitesuit like his father.

Against all reason, there were still times when he felt that old tug of longing, even now. He shook his head at the unwanted thought. He’d had his chance. The Emperor himself had as much as told him he could take any posting he wanted, a pure dreamjack. He’d elected to remain a warstrider, and now… what was he?

He felt a bit lost, actually. He couldn’t maintain the fiction of being a striderjack when he was no longer a Thorhammer. For almost two years the 5th Loki and Alessandro’s Assassins had been both family and home.

Now he had the Empire, a concept too large to provide any sense of belonging. Once he’d made his decision to accept the Emperor’s offer and transfer from the Hegemony Guard to the Imperial forces, he’d been enthusiastic enough about the change. The Imperial Navy was by far the most powerful spacefaring force in human space, and the appointment itself a singular honor for any
gaijin
officer.

What then, he wondered, was he supposed to make of his assignment to the 4th Rangers, a Hegemony unit? His orders were for TAD—Temporary Attached Duty—so it wasn’t like this was a permanent demotion.

Why did it feel that way?

He watched impassively through his cephlink as the blue light engulfing the
Hayai
flared and vanished, replaced by the black of space. One star, brighter than the rest, detached itself from the sun-strewn backdrop.
Hayai’s
AI picked out worlds against the stars, marking them with brackets and scrolling columns of data. The fifth world was less than a hundred million kilometers ahead, already showing the red-gold tint of vegetation. Two small moons circled at a distance, reminding Dev of the Lunarian Hypothesis. Could those tiny twin worlds raise tides enough to explain the presence of life on Eridu? Or did they merely demonstrate that human exobiologists didn’t yet know all there was to know about life in all its forms and haunts?

Numerous points of colored light crawled slowly across Dev’s vision, each identified by coded data.
Hayai
was beginning to pick up the radio transponders of ships in-system and was projecting their locations and IDs on the cephlink display. Slowly, slowly, as deceleration dragged at Dev and made him feel ponderously heavy, Eridu swelled into a mottled disk of oranges, blues, browns, and dazzling swirls of white. Babylon appeared as a point of silver light three and a half planetary diameters out.

Linkcode accepted. Datafeed resume
—

Synchorbital facilities: Single sky-el link. Babel to Babylon, height 39,690 km, permanent orbital population (2536) 112,219.…

Thanks to the planet’s thirty-two-hour-plus rotation, Eridu possessed one of the tallest sky-els in the Shichiju—almost forty thousand kilometers. The synchorbital facility, though home to over a hundred thousand people, was a relatively small and primitive-looking straggle of pressurized habs and modules and a single docking facility, Shippurport. Several ships were already docked at the sprawling orbital gantries, including an Imperial destroyer, the
Tokitukaze.
Dev wondered what had brought her to Eridu, and whether her arrival had anything to do with his mission.

In keeping with the system’s ancient Mideast naming motif, the spaceport’s town was Shippur, the main orbital city was Babylon, and, inevitably perhaps, the sky-el itself was the Tower of Babel. The towerdown was called Babel, little more than a large frontier trading camp located on an equatorial plateau between jungle and sea. Eridu had little to recommend it as a site for human colonization, mild polar climate or not, but there would always be a few, Dev knew, who would tolerate impossible conditions for the chance of striking it rich… or simply for a chance to start life over.

The Governor’s official residence was in Babylon, not far from the spaceport, inside a rotating carousel that duplicated Eridu’s eight-tenths surface gravity. Five hours after the
Hayai
finally docked at Shippurport, Dev, wearing his best dress Imperial blacks and with his
Teikokuno Hoshi
at his throat, was palming his ID into the Residence AI, then being led by bowing courtiers to the Governor’s office.

Eridu’s
Chiji
was not an ethnic Japanese, though like many Hegemony governors he was of Imperial birth. Prem Thanarat was from Bangkok, one of Japan’s Imperial enclaves on Earth, and it was said that he owed his post to his long and personal friendship with the
Fushi
Emperor himself.

“So, Lieutenant Cameron. You are the Emperor’s expert on the Xenophobes,” Prem said in perfect Inglic as Dev stepped up before the Governor’s ornate work desk. He was a small man with nut-brown skin and old-fashioned, thick-rimmed glasses balanced on his nose. He didn’t look older than fifty or so, and Dev wondered just when and how he had gotten to be friends with an Emperor who had already ruled for eighty-five years. Possibly Prem, too, was on an anti-aging regimen… which just might explain why his dark eyes looked so tired. His voice, though, was light, almost musical in its intonation.

“Hai, Chijisama.”
Dev bowed formally.
“Hajimemashte.”

“Please, no formalities and no Nihongo,” Prem said, carelessly waving a hand. He gestured and an aide produced a comfortably padded chair on a frictionless base. “Sit, sit. How was your trip from Earth?”

“Fine, Your Excellency. A little tedious.” His weight in the chair locked the base to the floor, and the back shifted to a more comfortable position. Most of the technology and art in the room, Dev saw, had come from Earth or other Core Worlds.

“I can imagine. Scant room on a courier for civilization.
O-cha?”