Jackers by William H Keith Read Free Book Online

into the system. But the constellation of green and amber lights flickering and shifting across a readout console close by his head showed the system to be functioning normally. He brought his palm implant down again against the sweat-slick coolness of the interface. There was a burst of static, an unfolding view of ships and orbital base and the looming bulge of Daikoku…
    … and then he was bumped off again, hard.
    “You are relieved, Chusasan,” an electronic voice said in his ear. “We will take it from here.”
    Lloyd recognized Tanemura’s dry and matter-of-fact phrasing. So, that was it. Tanemura had come on-line and booted him off. Elsewhere on the control deck, Lloyd saw other men and women, all gaijin, rising from their link couches with looks ranging from bewilderment to anger. The Nihonjin had kicked every non-Japanese off the net, had decided to fight the battle themselves without gaijin help!
    Their very evident lack of trust burned in Lloyd’s gut like a hot coal.

    Even now, after so much had happened, it seemed strange to be on this side of Hegemony targeting radars and lasers. Just a couple of years ago, he’d been a loyal soldier of the Hegemony, a warstrider, and well on his way to a command of his own. By being the first human to establish peaceful contact with the alien Xenophobes, Dev had been made a hero of the Empire despite his gaijin status. As a koman, an Imperial military advisor, he’d been sent to Eridu, Chi Draconis V, to help suppress the rising tide of anti-Imperial, anti-Hegemony discontent there. He’d cast his lot with the rebels, however, when his warstrider unit had been ordered to destroy one of the colonists’ domed cities.
    There were some deeds for which orders—even orders backed by threat of court-martial or of summary execution—were simply not enough. He’d mutinied, refusing his orders, and had been arrested and interrogated by Imperial agents as a result. Katya had gotten him out.
    Katya Alessandro. He missed her, missed her more than he’d expected to. He would have liked it if she could have accompanied him on this mission, but she was back on New America, busily trying to hammer together something like a decent warstrider force out of raw recruits and Hegemony expatriates. Once she’d been his commanding officer, but that seemed like ages ago, back when they’d both been warstriders in a Hegemony unit, fighting the Xenophobes on Loki, then venturing with the First Imperial Expeditionary Force into the true Frontier beyond human-inhabited space.
    That had been when Dev had finally made meaningful contact with a Xeno. As a result, he’d received the Imperial Star and been made an Imperial koman. Katya had rejected the Empire, returning to her native New America to work with the Confederation government, and with Travis Sinclair.
    She’d made the right choice, and Dev had made the wrong one. He knew that now. A government system as corrupt as the present Imperial/Hegemony stewardship of Terra could not be reformed from within. Maybe reform would have done some good once, but the rot had gone too deep, the people in power now had too much vested interest in maintaining that power, at any cost. Human governments had followed the same pattern time after time after bloody time in the past, reaching the point where only revolution could cleanse the slate and let people start anew.
    With little choice in the matter, then, Dev had joined the rebels and participated in the Battle of Eridu, leading the assault team to capture the Tokitukaze at the planet’s synchorbital station while Confederation warstriders and native Eriduan militias had held off the Imperial Marines at Raeder’s Hill. They’d fought the Imperials to a standstill, partly because Dev and his raiders had dropped the captured Imperial destroyer into an orbit that took her across the battlefield. A salvo from the destroyer’s shipboard laser batteries had been more than enough to break that final