Rebellion (28 page)

“Affirmative.”

He broke the mental seal on his orders, and words spilled across his visual overlay.

SECRET

TO:
COMMANDING OFFICER, COMPANY A, 1ST BATTALION, 4TH TERRAN RANGERS

FROM:
HEMILCOM, ERIDU STATION, ERIDU SYNCHORBIT

RE:
OPERATIONAL ORDERS

1. 
DANGEROUS REVOLUTIONARY FORCES HAVE SEIZED THE MAIN CITY DOME OF THE TOWN OF TANIS [MAPREF 243-LAT 87°15'32"
S/LON 02E]. THEY ARE ARMED WITH MINING LASERS AND WEAPONS STOLEN FROM LOCAL ARMORY. AND ARE BELIEVED TO HAVE A LARGE STOCKPILE OF ARMS HIDDEN IN THE CITY.

2. 
IT IS IMPERATIVE THAT THIS INSURRECTION BE PUT DOWN IMMEDIATELY AND WITH THE UTMOST VIGOR. AS A DEMONSTRATION OF HEGEMONIC WILL AGAINST REVOLUTIONARY ELEMENTS.

3. 
UPON RECEIPT OF THIS ORDER. YOU WILL DEPLOY YOUR COMPANY IN OPEN ORDER AGAINST THE TANIS TOWN DOME. YOU WILL USE ALL AVAILABLE MEANS TO BREACH SAID DOME, DISPERSE THE MOB, AND END THE INSURRECTION. YOU ARE AUTHORIZED TO USE MAXIMUM FORCE.

4. 
A SEARCH IS TO BE CONDUCTED FOR WEAPONS STOCKPILES. THESE SHOULD BE INVENTORIED AND PLACED UNDER GUARD FOR SURRENDER TO IMPERIAL FORCES.

5. 
MINING AND ORE PROCESSING FACILITIES ARE TO BE PRESERVED IF POSSIBLE. THE MAIN HABITAT AREAS. HOWEVER, ARE TO BE DEMOLISHED. A HARSH DISPLAY WILL IMPRESS THE REBELLIOUS ELEMENTS AND CONVINCE THEM OF THE HEGEMONY’S DETERMINATION TO MAINTAIN CONTROL.

6. 
THREE COMPANIES 1ST BATT. 3RD IMPERIAL MARINES HAVE BEEN DEPLOYED FROM LUXOR [MAPREF 243-LAT 86°11'02"
S/LON 01E] AS BACKUP, AND WILL BE AVAILABLE AS ACTIVE RESERVES AND CLOSE SUPPORT. COORDINATE ACTION AND CLOSE SUPPORT LOGISTICS WITH TAI-I NAGAI [VIRCOMCHAN 39874].

—PREM

Dev stared with his mind’s eye at the orders, aghast. It couldn’t be…

Unexpectedly, the image of his father rose from somewhere in the back of his mind. At Lung Chi, Michal Cameron had
been faced with a split-second, life-or-death decision, one that had him weighing the lives of some millions of civilians and military personnel already in synchorbit against the
lives of half a million people still trapped on the surface of the planet with a surfacing horde of Xenophobes. The horror of that decision, Dev knew, had had more to do with his suicide than had the court-martial or the official disgrace.

He thought of almost two thousand people as the air pressure relentlessly dropped, as their oxygen bled away until there was simply not enough left to sustain life. And it wasn’t just the order to breach the dome, either, though that part of things demonstrated that HEMILCOM was determined that there would be no survivors. Turn lasers, monofilament rounds, and rockets on a crowd of civilians? Gods of humanity, there were
children
in there!

Someone, cool and remote and with the analytical detachment that high-level command brings, had decided that the village of Tanis should be eliminated as a lesson to the rebels. Such Olympian detachment rarely took into account the
human
aspects of a situation. Dev didn’t believe for a moment that the order had actually originated with Governor Prem.

For all of his relatively brief military career, Dev had tried to be the good soldier, the faithful warrior, following each order given without question. He was realizing now that, sometimes, there were orders that could not be obeyed, not if he was to live with himself afterward.
These
were such orders.…

And Dev refused to obey them.

Chapter 23

The Imperium, through the Hegemony, has blockaded our worlds, raped our industry, deprived our people of life and liberty, and denied us redress. Where then is justice? Where equality under law? The Imperial Peace is not
our
peace!

—from a speech given on New America

Travis Sinclair

C.E.
2537

Dev reread the RAM document, disbelieving, feeling like he’d somehow gotten caught up in an unusually realistic ViRdrama and needed only to break contact with a palm interface to lift the spell. The alphanumerics suspended in his mind remained stubbornly unchanged, reality, not virtual reality.

A mistake? The name at the end suggested otherwise, though Dev wasn’t sure he believed it. Prem was not HEMILCOM, though he technically commanded the Hegemony military forces on and over Eridu. Dev guessed that Omigato was a more likely source of those orders; if that was true, if the Emperor’s representative was making the decisions now. Hegemony Military Command might even be out of the command loop entirely.

What would
Chusa
Barton think about this? Apparently he
didn’t even know, since there was no copies-to tag line. The regiment’s commander was at Babel, sorting things out after the battle with the Xenos. Possibly that was deliberate as well: Dev had the cold, ice-slick feeling that he personally had been maneuvered into this.

Were the orders Omigato’s? Or Prem’s? It didn’t matter. The orders themselves were… monstrous. Unthinkable. There
had
to be a mistake.

“HEMILCOM, this is Ranger Blue One. Come in.”

“We read you. Go ahead. Blue One.”

There’s been a transmission error of some kind. You people can’t mean this.”

“Ah, Ranger Blue One, please clarify. What are you talking about?”

“These orders you just fed me! What the hell is going on up there?”

He felt the feather-light touch of an ID check probing the upper layers of his RAM, checking once again his authentication codes. “I don’t know the precise nature of your orders,
Tai-i,”
the voice came back. “But I can tell you that
they came through proper channels from a very high source and they have been verified. I suggest that you carry them out, immediately and without question.”

“Who am I talking to?”

“This is
Shosa
Hector Sandoval, and I have just received confirmation of your orders from the transmitting authority. You are directed to carry out your orders.”

A
shosa
—the equivalent of an army major, and relatively low on the hierarchy of the HEMILCOM staff.

“Shosa,
these orders require us to breach the dome of an Eriduan town and attack the civilians inside. That is nothing less than murder! Anyone who survives the attack will die when their dome depressurizes!”

“I suggest,
Tai-i,
that you not discuss these orders over communications channels. They are classified secret, which is why they were fed to you as coded RAM data. I also suggest that a company commander is not qualified to assess the nature or the military necessity of the orders he is—”

“Gok
military necessity, we’re not carrying out these orders!”

“Kuso, Tai-i!”
Koenig’s voice interrupted. “What’s going on?”

The rest of the company hadn’t been told the content of the orders yet, but they must have picked up at least part of his exchange with HEMILCOM. Dev decided to bring them in at once, since his disobeying a direct order would certainly involve them as well.

“We’ve been ordered to breach the Tanis dome and attack that demonstration,” he said curtly. “They’re telling us to kill everyone.”

The responses chorused through Dev’s head. “My God!” “They can’t do that!” “What?” “Someone’s screwed up, right?”

Dev was already considering alternatives… seizing the town’s main airlock, say, and deploying into the city. But the orders
specified
that the hab areas be destroyed. Someone up in synchorbit wanted eighteen hundred civilians to die.

Horror choked him; had he been in his body instead of linked to the Ghostrider he might have been physically ill, but the cephlinkage itself was damping down the most savage of his emotions. Anger flooded through his brain like a dark red tide, leaving him temporarily paralyzed, unable to activate a single circuit in the strider.

There’d been a long moment’s delay, but now another voice sounded in Dev’s mind. “This is Omigato. There has been no error. Attack the town.”

He was speaking Inglic. Dev wondered if he was really speaking the language or if the AI was translating for him. The words were flat and without expression, but there was no way to tell one way or the other.

This, at least, confirmed that Omigato was the source of the orders, and not Prem. Why was the Imperial representative hiding behind Prem’s authorization? The answer seemed obvious. If records were checked later, Prem’s codes would be on the transmission authorization. The monsters who’d destroyed a small town would be Prem and Cameron, not Yoshi Omigato.

Was there a way to prove it? Dev checked his communications circuits, verifying that all transmissions were being recorded, but at the same time he knew that the precaution was meaningless. Recordings could be rewritten as easily a
S
ViRsimulations could be edited.

“No, sir,” Dev said. He found he could move again, think again, though horror lingered. “With respect… no. We won’t do it.”

He’d cut the rest of his company in on the channel. “You tell ’em, Captain!” someone called in the background. Was that Barre?
Shut up, you idiot, do you want to get court-martialed too?

“Tanis is occupied by hostile rebel forces,” Omigato said, the voice cold and implacable. “You are directed to attack the
town.”

“No, sir!
Iyeh!
” His resolve was stiffening. “There are women and kids in that town. My men are not murderers. We will not indiscriminately slaughter civilians!”

“If it is atmosphere loss you are concerned about, you may rest assured that we have that covered. You can’t possibly put a hole in that dome large enough to depressurize the entire dome in anything less than six hours. A marine unit has been detailed to follow up your assault. Their engineers will effect immediate repairs on the dome. There will also be medical units standing by to assist with civilian casualties. Now, will you carry out your orders?”

Dev thought of the demonstration in Winchester.
Where are the medics?

“No, sir.”

The silence that followed was deadly.

“You are relieved of command.
Chu-i
Paul DeVreis!”

“Y-yes, sir.”

Dev held his mental breath. Was he going to order DeVreis to continue the mission, to wipe out the town? What would happen?

“You are now in command of A Company. You will return your unit to base.
Tai-i
Cameron is to be placed under close arrest.”

“Uh… yes, sir.” Dev heard the confusion, the pain in DeVreis’s voice. “Captain…”

“You’d better do it, Paul,” he said gently. “Before they order you to do something worse.”

“Damn
the bastards!”

“Open circuit,” Dev warned. “Lieutenant DeVreis, carry out your orders.”

“Yes, sir. Let’s get the gok out of here.”

Dev heard the men muttering among themselves as the striders turned and pushed back into the woods.

Who, he wondered, were the Xenophobes? The shapeshifting monsters tunneling away kilometers below his feet? The anti-Hegemony mobs that urged dissolution of a government that had kept the peace for centuries?

Or the Imperials like Omigato, who called alien and human alike
gaijin,
and who issued such monstrous directives?

“Uh…
Tai-i?”
It was Gunnar Kleinst.

Dev shifted his optic feed to a rear scanner. Kleinst’s Swiftstrider was still at the edge of the woods, shifting its weight back and forth between its slender, birdlike legs. “DeVreis is in command now,” he said.

“I don’t care who’s in command,” Kleinst shot back. “Look, I can’t… I can’t go back. Do you understand? My family lives near here. Those are my
people
down there!”

“Captain?” DeVreis said.

“You’re in command now,” Dev said. “Not me.”

But it was not the sort of decision that could be casually tossed off to someone else. The entire company was still in a kind of shock, unable to decide which way to move, or how to react.

Dev knew what he had to do.

Swinging his Ghostrider about, he broke away from the others, smashing through the underbrush toward the lone Swiftstrider standing at the forest’s tree line. “Open for a direct feed!” he snapped, and he felt Kleinst’s RAM open for direct access. In less than a second, Dev copied the orders he’d just received into Kleinst’s files. “Get going!” he said, his voice urgent. “Fast! Tell the people in Tanis what’s going on, and show them the orders for proof! Tell ’em Imperial Marines are going to show up any time, and they’d better be ready for them.”

Dev wasn’t sure what the civilian population of Tanis could do if the Impies launched an all-out assault on the dome. At the very least they would have time to get breathing masks and oxygen ready, or even to begin evacuating the dome. At best, they might manage to get the word out to other cities on Eridu, to the shadowy forces of the Rebellion, perhaps. The government could try to wipe out one small village with secret orders to an isolated unit, but there was no way to carry out such orders against the aroused population of an entire planet.

“Sir?” Kleinst sounded desperate. “Come with me!”

“Go!” Dev roared over the link. “Now!”

The Swiftstrider pivoted on spindly legs, then broke and ran from cover, long, scissoring strides carrying the recon vehicle rapidly down the slope toward Tanis.

Dev found he wanted desperately to follow, but he still wasn’t sure just where his real duty lay—to himself or to his unit. If he deserted now, the fury of HEMILCOM might well descend on the entire company.