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  WARSTRIDER

  WARSTRIDER — 01

  WILLIAM H. KEITH, JR.

  AVON BOOKS • NEW YORK

  If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

  WARSTRIDER is an original publication of Avon Books. This work has never before appeared in book form. This work is a novel. Any similarity to actual persons or events is purely coincidental.

  AVON BOOKS

  A division of

  The Hearst Corporation

  1350 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, New York 10019

  Copyright © 1993 by William H. Keith, Jr.

  Cover illustration by Dorian Vallejo

  Published by arrangement with the author

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 92-90416

  ISBN: 0-380-76879-8

  All rights reserved, which includes the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever except as provided by the U.S. Copyright Law. For information address The Ethan Ellenberg Literary Agency, 548 Broadway, #5-E, New York, New York 10012.

  First AvoNova Printing: February 1993

  AVON TRADEMARK REG. U.S. PAT. OFF. AND IN OTHER COUNTRIES, MARCA REGISTRADA, HECHO EN CANADA

  Printed in Canada

  UNV 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  TERMINOLOGY AND GLOSSARY

  Japanese Words and Phrases

  Prologue

  Eight years before he joined the Hegemony Guard, Devis Cameron knew little of interstellar politics and cared less. He knew next to nothing about the far-off threat Man called the Xenophobes, or why the Imperial and Hegemony fleets had been mobilized in Eagle Sector, or even where Eagle Sector was. He’d not heard of a world called Lung Chi—yet—and all he’d ever seen of the Emperor had been canned glimpses in ViRnews feeds.

  And Dev most certainly did not understand why Imperial protocol demanded that Michal Andre Cameron divorce his wife and leave her and his family behind on Earth while he traveled up the Singapore Sky-el to assume his new post with the Imperial Staff at Tenno Kyuden, the Palace of Heaven. Politics, his father had called it, with a bitterness that astonished Dev. Damned, filthy extortion, his mother had called it, and then she’d burst into tears, because until the moment of that Imperial order, the Cameron family had been close and happy despite the fact that they were still non-Imperial citizens of Earth.

  Dev was sixteen standard that spring of 2532, old enough, certainly, to know what was happening, but since he knew nothing of the tangled relationship of Hegemony with Empire, he couldn’t understand why his father had to obey such a patently unjust command.

  Why couldn’t his father simply thank Tenno-heika for the honor but explain that he wanted to stay with his family?

  “Tell them you can’t do it!” Dev said, ashamed of the tears and unable to stop them. “Or, or tell them that you love Mom and that you want us to come along. I wouldn’t mind leaving Earth, and I’ll bet Mom wouldn’t either.”

  Michal Cameron’s eyes were moist as well. He was a big man, made bigger by the white and gold uniform of the Hegemony Navy he still wore. His shoulder boards and stiff collar bore the three cherry-blossom studs of taisa, a navy captain.

  “It’s just not that simple, son. I wish to God it were.”

  Dev’s eyes fastened to the gleaming gold sunburst his father wore at his throat. Teikokuno Hoshi, the Star of the Empire, awarded for extraordinary service to the Emperor.

  “It’s all because of that medal, isn’t it?”

  His father sighed. “It’s not just the medal, Dev. It’s not just the promotion. They’re transferring me to the Imperial Navy, giving me a slot on the Emperor’s Staff. It is an… honor.” His father’s face twisted, saying otherwise.

  Anger flared, edged with bitterness. “In other words, you had a choice between us and your career, right? And you chose your career!”

  “Try to understand. It’s not… not proper for an Imperial admiral to be married to someone who’s not an Imperial citizen. There are political considerations.” He looked away, shrugging helplessly. “So they have someone else for me to marry.”

  His father was silent for a long moment. They were sitting side by side on a park bench beneath an intensely blue, vibrant sky. Beyond the trees of Moosic Park, the West Scranton skyline gleamed, silver and transplas arcologies clustered about the blue-gray thrust of Bald Mountain. The city seemed to go on forever, tower upon tower, the high-tech anthill sprawl of the BosWash metroplex. A distant thunder rumbled, trailing far behind a fast-drawn scratch of white across the sky. Another ten hours and his father would be on one of those hypersonic suborbitals, on his way to the other side of the world… and to space.

  “If I refuse, well, I would be insulting some very powerful people. Gensui Munimori. My patron, Gensui Yoshida. Even the Emperor, who agreed to let a gaijin like me join the Imperial staff. They would all lose face. It would be… very bad.”

  “You act like they own you!”

  “Son, do you know the word seppuku?”

  “Huh? Sure. You… you mean they’d make you kill yourself?”

  “It’s possible. If the insult to the Emperor was considered grave enough. Certainly I’d have to leave the navy. I might not be able to get decent work, and that would be hard on you and your mother and your brother. A lot harder than this separation is going to be.

  “If I take the promotion, well, some things will still be the same. I’ll still love you and Mom and Greg very much, and I’ll visit you when I can. Not as much as we’d all like, maybe, but I’ll come see you every chance I get. I promise you that.

  “And lots of things’ll be better. We’ll have enough money to do things we couldn’t think about before.”

  “I don’t care about money—”

  “For one thing, we’ll be able to get you and Greg sockets.”

  “I don’t want sockets.” He held up his left hand, palm out, revealing the tracery of nano-grown metallic inlays in the skin at the base of his thumb. “I’ve got my interface.”

  “So does everyone else on the planet. Blast it, Dev, you need an education if you’re going to get anywhere, and I mean something better than West Scranton Traditional! You need to go to a decent school where they feed you direct through a jack. BosWash Technic, maybe. Or MIT.” He tapped the silvery ring of metal just visible in the short hair behind his right ear. He had another behind his left ear, and one at the base of his neck as well. Temporal sockets and cervical socket, T-sockets and C-socket, they connected directly with the cephlinkage plexus grown inside Michal Cameron’s brain.

  Few of Earth’s citizens could af
ford a three-socket, full-interface set, but the elder Cameron had been born to a wealthy family, one with old ties to the Kyoto world banking complex. He’d never been able to afford sockets for his family, though, not on a Hegemony naval officer’s pay. Dev’s cephlink and palm interface, of course, had been implanted free when he was a child. It gave him access to ViR entertainment, even some of the simpler interactive programs, and it let him access the communications systems and the computers upon which the world’s economy depended.

  “Sockets are your passport out of the arcologies and off the Earth and out to where you can be yourself,” his father told him. “This is the only way. Believe me.”

  “You’re making all these decisions for me. Like I’m some kind of damned computer you can just program to suit yourself!”

  “Your mom and I are programming you, as you put it, to be able to stand up for yourself. You know, an Earth kid these days doesn’t have much of a chance. Especially if he’s American and living in the HPAs.”

  “Doesn’t seem so bad to me.”

  “Maybe. Something like a billion Americans live in the Hegemony Protectorate Arcologies. No cares, no worries… and no cephlink implants or sockets to let them tap into their own futures. They don’t have futures, except what the Hegemony chooses to give them. Your mom and I want more for you. Lots more. In the outworlds you can still make something of yourself, but you’d damned well better have the hardware up here.” He tapped one bony finger against his skull. “Otherwise you’re just one of twelve billion other Earth kids with a bare minimum education and no useful skills. No employer, no shipping line, no survey agency, would even look at you.”

  Dev didn’t want to accept that. “What about Mom? What does she think about it?”

  “Actually, she’s the one who suggested the divorce. She wants what’s best for you kids. And this is best. For all of us.”

  Dev had enough of his father’s vision and his mother’s pragmaticism to see that his father was right about the need for sockets. But the realities of politics, of a Japanese Empire that directly ruled only a small part of Earth, yet so dominated the Terran Hegemony that it could casually destroy a man’s family in the name of propriety, were still utterly alien.

  He wondered if he would ever understand. …

  Chapter 1

  To understand modern technic civilization, one must understand the significance of the intracephalic cybernetic linkage implant, the cephlink as it is more popularly known. A complex, membrane-thin webwork of nanotechnic circuitry, literally grown by programmed medical nano manipulating injected raw materials molecule by molecule deep within the brain’s longitudinal sulcus, the cephlink serves as an extension of Man’s intelligence, memory, and power, as well as serving as a direct link between organic brain functions and any appropriately equipped artificial intelligence, or AI.

  In the course of the past three centuries, the cephlink has become the bridge between human and machine intelligence, and the means by which Man has at last stepped beyond the limitations of the flesh.

  —The Rise of Technic Man

  Fujiwara Naramoro

  C.E. 2535

  This, Dev thought as he stepped off the freighter’s boarding ramp, is my last chance.

  The steel-lined cavern, open to vacuum only moments earlier, was still cold, and Dev palmed the smartpatch on his suit to raise its thermostat. Steam spilled from Mintaka’s vents as port maintenance personnel and ten-meter cargo lifters moved in.

  “Hey, look at the whitesuit!” a raucous voice called from the open hatchway at his back. Catcalls and laughter hooted in the chill air.

  “Avast there, it be Fleet Admiral Cameron, the scourge of space!”

  “Yah! Hey, Navy! Seen any Xenos?”

  Ignoring the jibes of his former shipmates, Dev hoisted his shipbag and followed the glowing holosign proclaiming “Arrivals” in three languages. The docking bays and towers of Opptarn Havn starport unfolded from the tethered asteroid that kept Loki’s space elevator taut; its greater-than-orbital velocity about the planet generated an out-is-down spin gravity of a third of a g, low enough to put a bounce in Dev’s step as he headed toward customs.

  The ribbing he’d been getting from Mintaka’s crew for the past week only underscored what he already knew. He couldn’t go back, not now. If he couldn’t make it out here, well…

  Damn it, eighteen light-years ought to be far enough from Earth and the Palace of Heaven that the name Cameron no longer carried his father’s shame. If he couldn’t fulfill his promise to himself here at Loki, there wasn’t much point in traveling farther.

  The customs check didn’t take long; he was wearing or carrying everything he owned. Beyond customs was the Starhigh Strip, a spiral corridor packed pressure-wall-to-wall with the businesses—or their high-tech successors—that have flourished around transport terminals for millennia. Bars, paycubes and flopcaps, locker rentals, and pawnshops jostled side by side in an endless, cluttered tangle with tattoo joints, uniform stores, and orjack houses, their gaudy come-on holosigns vying with one another in Norsk-Lokan, Nihongo, and Inglic.

  Dev considered buying a RAM language implant for the Lokan dialect of Norsk but decided against it. He didn’t expect to be here for more than a few days, and nearly everyone spoke Inglic, Nihongo, or both, the languages of trade and commerce throughout the Shichiju.

  Hell, that was part of the problem. There was nowhere he could go without bumping into the Empire. Five minutes later he was aboard a transfer capsule with twenty other new arrivals to Loki, riding the tether in to Asgard Synchorbital.

  Technically the Empire of Nihon ruled only Japan and Japan’s assets on Earth and in Earth-Lunar space. It was the Terran Hegemony that represented the unified governments of fifty-seven sovereign nations on Earth, plus the colonial administrations of the Shichiju, The Seventy, as the scattering of colony worlds across known space was called, though their number was actually seventy-eight.

  But everyone knew that the Terran Hegemony’s power extended only so far as the Imperial Diet permitted. Japanese industrial might, first on Earth, later in orbit, had made Dai Nihon the single most powerful state in the history of Man. Three centuries after the Fall of the West, it was Nihon—through her control of Terran banking, shipbuilding, and nanotechnic engineering—that dominated the commerce between the stars and the spread of Man to new worlds.

  It was Nihon that enforced the Teikokuno Heiwa, the imperial Peace.

  Imperial Peace. That, Dev thought bitterly, was a laugh. Seven planets, at last count, had been lost to the Xenophobes, and four more were infested. Neither Empire nor Hegemony had yet been able to organize a decent defense, or even to find out how the enemy spread from system to system, despite constant surveillance by orbiting Imperial Navy warships.

  It wasn’t that Dev hated the Empire. Michal Cameron’s disgrace and suicide still weighed on Dev, of course, but he understood that there’d been nothing personal in what the Empire had done to the Cameron family. It had been politics, nothing more.

  Politics, then, had led Dev to the outworlds after he’d finished five years at BosWash Technic. Politics had blocked his entrance into the Hegemony Naval Academy at Singapore, because the son of Admiral Michal Cameron slotted into a starship’s helm might be a bad risk, and politics had decreed that the only off-world slot he could find was aboard an aging Orion Lines freighter.

  He’d jacked aboard the Mintaka for almost three years, beginning as cargo officer and working his way to second helm. Dev was a starpilot, and a good one. The cephlink and sockets his father had arranged for him eight years earlier were among the best hardware implants available, and at BWT he’d learned how to interface with a wide range of equipment, from librarian AIs to heavy loaders to ascraft. Aboard the Mintaka he’d swum the godsea, as the Virtual Reality of a K-T drive link was known, and since his first interspace translation, he’d known with unshakable conviction that this was what he’d been born for.

  But ever s
ince Lung Chi, and Michal Cameron’s death the following year, he’d promised himself that he would do it in his father’s service. If he couldn’t join the Hegemonic fleet through the Academy on Earth, he’d do it here, on one of the outworlds, where Cameron was just a name and Lung Chi did not carry the same political baggage it did on Earth.

  The synchorbit city rotated about the Loki space elevator, multiple tori on a thread-thin axis. The transfer capsule let Dev and the other passengers off in the city’s zero-g core, where he caught a spoke shuttle to his destination out in the one-g ring.

  Emerging from the shuttle, Dev stepped into another world. Asgard’s gleaming lightscape exploded around him in a cacophony of noise, color, and motion, a swirling confusion bewildering after months inside Mintaka’s tight and ordered microcommunity. Three-D displays and holosigns, storefronts and module entry ways, tubecar ports and jacking booths, throbbing music and babbling crowd noise and an unending sea of humanity, bombarded him with light and images and an almost palpable sense of crowded urgency.

  One entire, curving wall of Valhalla Concourse was transparent. Stars and the cloud-shrouded half disk of Loki rotated slowly beyond, the world’s clouds dazzling in the ruddy light of the sun Loki’s colonists called Dagstjerne, the Daystar. The sky-el was barely visible, a hair-thin slash of silver dwindling toward the planet’s equator. Elsewhere, two brilliant orange stars, the brighter members of the 36 Ophiuchi triplet, marched in stately side-by-side procession.

  Dev paid no attention to the view, focusing instead on the city’s bustling confusion. He needed to find a public information kiosk. There…

  Shouldering through the crowd, Dev approached the pillar rising from the middle of the Concourse. By pressing the network of gold and silver threads grown into the base of his left thumb against the interface panel and closing his eyes, he linked with the kiosk’s AI, asking it where he was.