Warstrider: Jackers (Warstrider Series, Book Three) (18 page)

"Okay," Tharby said at last. "We listen, humie. But not long." He gestured toward the dead projection wall. "Stilters're out there, an' they might come back."

"Dak
hurt
!" the laborer on the floor said, still rubbing his injured knee.

"I'll hurt you more if ya try t'do somethin' like that without me sayin' so."

Yes, Katya decided, Tharby was definitely one of the leaders here. He would be the one she would have to reach.

"Are you all here . . . by yourselves?" she asked. "I mean, aren't there any full humans about?"

"Y'mean th' holders?" A warehouse worker grinned, slapping a massive club against his open palm. His voice was thick and raspy, as though his vocal cords weren't fully formed, but the words carried the full force of his sneer. "They's runned, ain't they?"

"Eh. Jus' her left, then," said another who could have been twin to the first . . . and perhaps he was. Successful genie models were often created sterile, with reproduction handled in vitro through cloning, and the embryos implanted in gene-tailored host mothers. Even those that could engage in sex were more often cloned than not, simply to guarantee the preservation of desired physical traits. The sameness of the faces surrounding her contributed powerfully to their doll-like, almost stylized look, that of mannequins, identical save for details of hair, dress, or rare facial blemish.

Katya zeroed in on Tharby, on the Dow-Mitsubishi logo on his jumpsuit. "You!" she demanded. "Who did you work for?"

The genie jerked a thumb over his shoulder, in the direction of the big manufacturing plant outside the spaceport. "Chemical nanoplant, o' course. Jefferson Nanochem, Contract Number 897364." He recited the information in a mechanical staccato, as though it had been drilled into him over the course of years.

"Right. And they're owned by who?"

"Uh . . . Dow-Mitsubishi." He sounded less confident now.

"And where are they?"

He shook his head. "Don't know."

"Earth," she answered for him. "Tokyo, on Earth. So the people who hold your contract answer to Tokyo. Right?"

"I guess so. . . ."

"Don't let 'er gok yer head, Tharby," another genie said. "Th' guys what holds our contracts is Newamies. Like
her
!"

"If they work for an Earth corp," she said evenly, "you can bet they work for Nihon. Tokyo controls just about all of the business in the Hegemony, one way or another. That means they hold Jefferson Nanochem's contracts, just like Jefferson Nanochem holds yours."

"Aw, full humies ain't under contract," a silver-haired
ningyo
said. Others added their opinions, many of them more like animal grunts than speech. Many low-range genie models, Katya knew, were designed without vocal cords. For the simplest workers, it was necessary only that they understand orders, not speak themselves.

How much of all of this, she wondered, were they understanding?

"They are if they're linked to Nihon for yen and promotions," Katya replied. "Do you know what yen are?"

"Uh, like work credits," the
ningyo
said. She caught her lower lip between small, perfect teeth. "Only 'lectronic. Yeah?"

"Yeah. Your holder can't do a thing unless Nihon pays him. Exactly like your contract. That's why the Confederation is fighting the Hegemony. We want to hold our
own
contracts!"

"How . . . how could you help us?"

Katya wasn't sure of the answer to that one herself. Genies, after all, were bred not only for low IQs and specialized work, but for docility as well. What kind of warriors would they make?

Still,
these
genies had obviously turned some kind of corner. Carrying weapons, threatening a full human, talking about leaving their workplaces for other cities . . .
they certainly were not acting like typical genies.
Watch yourself, girl
, Katya told herself.
Just like with humans, these guys are individuals. There's no such thing as "typical."

"I'm not sure," she admitted after a moment. "I might be able to teach you how to fight, how to defend yourselves. If you help me get back to my own people, we should be able to find work for you. Work that you . . . that you'd enjoy."

There was a long silence at that. Katya could sense the crowd's uneasiness, could smell it in the hot, close air of the place. The silence went on so long she wondered if she'd said the wrong thing.

This was a dark and normally well-hidden aspect of New American life that Katya had never examined, had rarely even been aware of. New America's Hegemonic charter specifically outlawed slavery, but genegineered "constructs"—they were never referred to legally as "human" or as "people," of course—did not share the rights of their creators. Katya remembered well the ongoing debate between Rainbow and Liberty over whether or not genetic constructs should be considered the same as full humans and given full-human rights.

That particular political question had never been resolved. On the one hand, freedom parties insisted that intelligence and self-awareness themselves defined what could be legally called human, even though those terms were subject to some pretty fuzzy interpretation sometimes. How intelligent did a creature have to be to qualify, especially when no one could even agree on a good definition of what intelligence was?

Katya was struck by an amused revelation. Neurologists and somatic engineers understood the mechanics of the nervous system well enough to grow cephlinks that interacted directly with human thought processes, allowing the downloading of information, even of sensory data like sight and sound, directly to the brain. Yet
they
still
couldn't precisely define "intelligence," or even measure it on any kind of absolute scale.

Even the slowest genies were almost certainly more intelligent in more different ways than unmodified Terran chimpanzees, and chimps were smart enough to devise tools, plan future actions, and use symbolic language; the smartest genies were brighter—in the sense of knowing more, reasoning better, speaking more clearly—than any dull-witted adult human or, say, a four-year-old human child. Tharby, for instance, to judge by his speech, was probably only a little below the full-human mean on the intelligence scale. Where could one possibly draw any kind of line?

On the other side of the argument were those cultures and economies that required cheap genie labor, or at least claimed to, and insisted that they were bred for happiness doing what they'd been created to do. That argument—and the moral issues of exploiting intelligent genetic constructs—could be as murky and as circular as any question about the nature of intelligence. Even in a society where energy was essentially free, and where most manufacturing was carried out in nanotechnic plants, there were still plenty of jobs suited for specialized laborers. Nanopart assembly, repairing complex or nonstandard circuitry, quality control, running dumbloaders, providing nonvirtual sexual entertainment for people who couldn't or didn't use ViRsexual recreation, those were all tasks too demanding or nonprogrammable to be carried out by robots, too dull-minded to be efficiently or economically handled by socketed workers.

Genies liked their work; they'd been
designed
to like it. Genies were cheap, easy to make, cheap to maintain. They weren't
owned
, not in a legal sense, so they couldn't be called slaves, but their contracts were bought and sold by genetic labor brokers, so it amounted to much the same thing. They didn't have the implants in hand or brain to enable them to interact with human datanets, including, of course, financial linkages, so they
couldn't be paid in yen or planetary currencies. Instead, they received "labor credits" for room and board, clothing, and other needs, all provided by the humans who held their contracts, their "holders."

Katya wondered how such a disparate band as this one had gotten together in the first place. Where were their holders? Fled, she supposed, when the first Impie fighters started booming down through the skies above Port Jefferson.

Finally, Tharby sighed. "Take 'er out back," he said. "Let's
show
'er."

She thought they meant to kill her, but she was escorted out of
The Newamie's Down
with an almost ceremonial courtesy, taken around the corner of the building through a narrow back alley that opened onto a wider street.

Katya had not been on this side of the building when she'd entered it, hours before, and she was unprepared for the horror she saw there, a nightmare that came upon her so suddenly she gasped and nearly fell.

There'd been a slaughter here, right in the middle of the street, dozens of people cut down by the obscenely neat, random slices of repeated
sempu
blasts. There were so many pieces of arms and legs and torsos, so many severed heads and recognizable fragments of heads, so many unraveling tangles of internal organs and other chunks that were simply unrecognizable save as raw, blood-soaked meat that Katya could not even begin to guess how many people had been killed here. The blood had pooled in the lowlying parts of the street, ankle-deep or deeper.

People? She checked herself. That vacant-eyed, long-haired head lying in the street a few meters away could be Sonya's identical twin. These were
genies
, slaughtered en masse. Hell, they must have been packed together in a group, a mob, when the
sempu
started flying.

"That's what they did to us," Tharby said. "That's why we ain't goin' back. Never.
Never
."

Katya opened her mouth to say something, anything . . . and the sudden hot lurch in her stomach caught her completely off guard. Turning away from her escorts, she leaned heavily against a wall, emptying her stomach in a racking succession of deep, explosive heaves.

No mere battlefield horror had ever affected her this way. Indeed, years ago, during her recruit training, some of her official downloading had been designed specifically to harden her against the raw stuff of nightmares that was a modern battlefield, scenes exactly like this, wet with crimson gore, and she'd seen the reality plenty of times since.

But nothing could have prepared her for the sheer, mass-murder horror that she saw in front of her now.

"They was hidin' in that warehouse over there," Tharby said behind her. "I saw it. Lots of us did. A stilter came up outside, right over there, ordered 'em t'come out, hands up. They did. It was a full human that was givin' them the order, right? They had t'obey. They came out, an' then th' stilter started shootin' that tangled thread stuff that'll snick off a finger if'n you ain't careful. Chopped 'em to bits, then flamed the warehouse, just t'make sure they was all dead."

"What . . . what kind of stilter?"

Tharby snorted. "Don't know th' name. They's all pretty much the same, right?" He thought about it a moment. "I guess it was one o' the smaller ones, though. An' different from the ones I seen around here late, like."

Imperial, then. But she'd known that. Confed or militia striders wouldn't turn
sempu
on civilians. She didn't even think they carried
sempu
in their military inventory.

Katya wondered why they'd done it. Possibly the enemy striderjack had panicked at seeing such a large mob emerging from the building. Or maybe he had orders to spread terror among the area's inhabitants,
or to keep large numbers of civilians from wandering around behind the Nihon lines.

Or maybe he'd simply assumed, as so many people did, that genies were biological robots of some kind, near-mindless and of no particular worth save to their owners.
Sempu
was a cheap way of killing a lot of unarmored or lightly armored people all at once.

"This," she said, her words tasting sour, "is part of what we're fighting against. The Impies've declared war against all of us, you and me. And maybe, maybe I can help you."

"We fightin' our own wars now," Dak said, menace in his voice. "Don't need help from humies. We
fight
!"

"Against warstriders? Stilters? I don't think so." She nodded toward the length of pipe another laborer held in his hands, a crude club. "Think you'd fare any better than
they
did, attacking a warstrider with that?"

"Then what are we supposed to do?" a toygirl wailed. "They'll come an' kill us!"

"You
could
learn to fight," Katya said softly. "And with weapons that'll give you half a chance. But you'll have to decide whose side you're on first."

"We don't need your Con, Confudration," a warehouse loader said. "Way I hear it, th' Chinese an' the Ukies ain't even in this war. We could go there, t' Canton or Nowa-K." He looked around at the others near him, as though searching for support. "This war is between th' Nihons and th' Newamies, right?"

"Yeah. Ain't got nothin' to do with us," a girl added.

"It does if you expect to get out of here alive," Katya replied. "The Impies have their, their stilters everywhere. Hear them? That rumbling noise is them bombarding Jefferson, from the sound of it. You'll have to pass their lines, and I don't think they'll just let you walk through." She gestured at the pitiful scramble of blood-soaked genie body parts. "No more than they let
them
go."

A discussion started among several of the genies and quickly grew to argument status. Tharby was really getting into it with another techie who looked exactly like him.

The sight was amusing . . . and instructive. Katya had seen her share of poorly written ViRdramas, both narratives and interactives, which had introduced cloned genies at one point or another in the tale. It never failed to amaze her how many people thought in this day and age that clones were copies of one another in mind as well as body, robots as interchangeable as circuit blocks.

Sheer nonsense, of course. Clones many genies might be, but that meant simply that they possessed identical DNA within the nuclei of their cells, not identical thoughts, goals, or ideas. Each was born as an infant just like a full-human child, raised in a créche, and schooled individually—though without cephlinks, of course, they couldn't receive downloads and their education was for that reason sharply limited.