Reclamation (Book One of the Art of War Trilogy), page 1
RECLAMATION
RICHARD SWAN
Copyright © Richard Swan 2015
Cover illustration by John Harris
All characters in this publication are fictitious. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved.
Acknowledgements
I owe a debt of gratitude to John Harris and Alison Eldred for the superb cover art; Chris Hopkinson for his wizardry; Tim Johnson and Tim MacDonald for reading early drafts; Kate Haigh for her tireless efforts; William Smith for reasons known only to himself; Katie Swan for her PR know-how; and Sophie Watson for her endless support.
Reclamation is for Jackie and Mark, without whom the book would not have been possible.
Table of Contents
The Crusade Fleet
I Exigency
Uvolon
Code Cyan
Exigency
Borderlands
Tip of the Spear
Navem Sigma
First Light
Retribution
II Tier Three
Head Start
Gonvarion
Firewall
Salted Wounds
Hard Lines
Mission Creep
Persons of Interest
Diplomacy
III Cause and EFFECT
Iyadi
Blackworld
Nerve Centre
Pinnacle
Planetfall
Duplicity
Zecad
Empire of the Fallen
THE CRUSADE FLEET
‘Our sins do not fade with the passage of time; they grow, like a cancer of the ages. Our sons, and their sons, will bear the burden of our wrongdoing for eternity.’
Executor Kohan Vesani, at the conclusion of the Ossican Civil War
The Sixteenth Crusade Fleet, a vast, meandering flotilla of a hundred thousand provari ships, vectored leisurely through the Vadian Spiral like some immeasurable intergalactic worm.
Two hundred thousand kilometres away, a pair of UNIS agents, ensconced within an invisible, refraction-shielded deep space relay, observed it.
They electronically marked and inventoried every single ship. It was an interminable and thankless task, one undertaken by an endless procession of dead-eyed junior intelligence personnel rotating into the relay every forty-five days. Forty-five days of eight-hour shifts, staring at holos, watching robotic clippers, corvettes, destroyers, cruisers, Deus-class capitals and Atlas-class MPVs, as they manoeuvred against the kaleidoscopic starfield in a perpetual ballet of naval logistics.
The surveillance yielded an inordinate amount of information. Millions of exabytes of data were processed, sifted and encoded by a dedicated army of virtual intelligences, then streamed sublight to the Vadian Mission Station, bounced off the Fleet Comms Array, and stored in a vast data sink buried under UN Joint Intelligence Command. There it would languish, occasionally agglomerated into neat dossiers and disseminated by people they would never meet, for reasons they would never know.
Matas Javik exhaled loudly and blinked bleary-eyed at the holo in front of him. Both the scale and futility of it defied comprehension. The Sixteenth Crusade Fleet was just one of dozens across the galaxy. The Provari Ascendancy had a staggering war machine, one that had been in motion for centuries and showed no signs of slowing down. Every year the United Nations Intelligence Service counted over a million ships sent across the Khāli Barrier and into Andromeda. The only purpose, the UN and its Tier-Three partners conjectured, was to wage some distant alien war, though against whom and for what reasons gave rise to few credible theories.
A small alarm on the holo bleeped in front of him, and he cancelled it with an irritable wave of his hand. Behind him the hatch to one of the sleep capsules swung open, and his colleague, Alec Horst, floated free of his harness and into the cramped hold.
‘G’morning,’ he mumbled, yawning. Using the grab hoops lining the hull, he pulled himself to their food cabinet and pulled free a few freeze-dried cereal bars.
‘Mm,’ Javik replied, not taking his eyes from the holo. The station computer had scanned and tagged another twelve ships during his shift, and he completed his review of the last – a sleek, fifty-gun corvette named after one of the provari winter gods – cursorily.
‘Anything interesting?’ Horst asked, arriving next to him with his mouth full of food. He floated above the console and zipped up his battered white jacket before pulling on a baseball cap and levering himself into the chair’s harness by his feet.
‘No,’ Javik replied and waved his holo out of existence. The enlarged, stylised graphic of the crusade fleet disappeared, and the nebulous blue gas clouds of the Upper Vadian Spiral took its place. Without enhancement, even the crusade fleet was near-invisible against the absence of any substantial starlight.
‘Mm,’ Horst grunted. He ripped open the second cereal bar. With a ripple of his fingers, his own holo sprang into life in front of him, and he activated a small music terminal, filling the hold with a lazy beat. Javik wrinkled his nose. He preferred silence, but then it wasn’t his shift.
‘Only twenty more days,’ Horst said with relish, taking control of the relay’s scanner and engaging the on-board computer. The crusade fleet appeared in front of them once again, the holo this time trained on a spherical Atlas-class MPV. ‘Any plans for tonight?’
Javik shrugged, loosening the shoulder straps of the harness. He nodded towards his sleep capsule. ‘Ultraporn, probably,’ he said tiredly, then changed his mind. ‘No. Sleep. Just plain, old-fashioned sleep.’
Horst slapped him on the shoulder, his ebony face splitting into a grin. ‘Have fun.’
Javik offered a half-smile. He was tired and bored. As a human presence, both he and Horst were practically obsolete, but unlike Horst, he had well over half his detachment yet to complete.
With a sigh he shouldered his way free of the harness and gently pushed himself out of the chair. He floated to the ceiling, and using the grab hoops he pulled himself to his sleep capsule. The entire life-support module was less than five metres in length and half that in height. It was also about as spartan as one would expect a deep space relay to be. Aside from a few basic furnishings – a pair of chairs in the cockpit, a food cabinet, two sleep capsules and an ablutions cubicle – the rest of the hold was bare metal, lined with thermal panels and ribbed by kilometres of pipes and wiring.
He did a lazy backflip and unzipped his jacket, stowing it in a small netted cargo hold on the wall. His eyes, despite their optical implants, were sore and dry, and he savoured the prospect of a good night’s sleep. He pulled open the hatch to his capsule and swung his legs up–
And abruptly stopped as a proximity alarm wailed into life.
‘Shit,’ he muttered. He thumped the console in front of him.
‘Event horizon, seventeen hundred kilometres,’ Horst half-shouted, twisting round in his harness.
Javik kicked off from the hull and glided to his seat, activating his holo with a flick of the wrist. ‘Who is stupid enough to even try that?’ he asked wearily. He manipulated the station’s enhanced optics and pulled up a holographic cube of their immediate vicinity. The crusade fleet appeared as a long strand of red in one of the topmost corners, the event horizon a pulsing blue circle three kilometres beneath it. Red warning graphics littered the grid.
‘I don’t like this,’ Javik muttered after a short pause, adrenaline coursing through his guts. Suddenly the boredom of cataloguing didn’t seem so unattractive after all.
‘What’s to like?’ Horst snapped, pulling on a headset from the console in front of him. ‘I’m putting this on the net.’ He opened an encrypted channel to the Vadian Mission Station.
‘It could just be another provar ship.’
Horst glanced at him. ‘Yeah, well, whatever it is it’s about to be another cloud of radioactive dust,’ he spat, tilting the peak of his cap up and mopping his brow with the back of his hand. He jabbed a finger at the holo. ‘And if that fleet starts getting antsy, we’ll be one with it.’
Javik cleared his throat. While they were operating under the mandate of the UN, they were still acting very much contrary to a host of galactic espionage treaties. The crusade fleet wouldn’t give a second thought to vaporising the relay along with them in it, and would face little censure for doing so.
Javik began to sweat. Their stealth capabilities could shield them from almost all long-range invasive scans, but they weren’t infallible.
‘VMS, possible hostile contact at Crusade Fleet Sixteen,’ Horst said next to him. ‘Event horizon opening at… sigma echo one, five delta nine, four four one six.’ He would provide a running commentary on what they saw; there was no point in waiting for a reply. The mission station was close to six billion kilometres away, and on sublight comms any message they sent wouldn’t be heard by UNIS personnel for over five hours.
Javik couldn’t take his eyes off the screen. The event horizon was large enough to fit a clipper through now, and its presence was causing discord in the nearby crusade fleet. Already the heavy frigate Vosporia had detached from the line and disgorged its payload of combat drones in anticipation of this unwelcome visitor. Other more recognisable defensive formations were being adopted among the smaller ships, but their reaction time was far too slow.
The wormhole was enveloped in phase fire and clouds of flak, and
‘Kaygryn?’ Javik shouted. There was no love lost between the two races, but even the kaygryn in all their genetic stupidity wouldn’t be so rash as to assault a crusade fleet. It was a move worse than suicide.
‘VMS, we have five kaygryn clippers at Crusade Fleet Sixteen, they have engaged, repeat, engaged CF16 with phase and solid ordnance,’ Horst dutifully continued, in a voice thick with self-doubt. Javik looked over to see the older man’s eyes wide and his brow damp with sweat.
A blinding sphere of white light heralded the destruction of the Vosporia at the hands of a scythe-like beam of energy which neatly bisected the frigate, causing both men to start in their seats. They watched in horror as atomic missiles burned through the Vosporia’s venting atmosphere in seconds, the heat of the nuclear flash-fire melting reinforced bulkheads as though they were wax and allowing implosion propagation to rampage through the remainder of the ship. Any crew that weren’t instantly vaporised or crushed to a fine paste by the collapsing bulkheads quickly suffocated in the freezing void.
‘Provari heavy frigate… destroyed…’ Horst murmured.
Another squadron of five kaygryn ships slingshotted through the wormhole before the event horizon winked out of existence. Provari combat drones quickly surrounded all ten kaygryn ships, making short work of four and badly damaging a fifth, but the newcomers blazed incessantly with phase fire and atomics, dispensing their own combat drones and clouds of mines and flak in a desperate, suicidal bid to inflict as much damage as possible.
Another alarm blared into life, and a fresh, unsolicited holo, dense with warning graphics, flickered into life in front of Javik.
‘The crusade fleet has engaged LRIS,’ he breathed, his voice shaking. It was nothing their stealth systems couldn’t withstand, but prolonged long-range invasive scanning would uncover them sooner or later.
Horst relayed as much to the UNIS Mission Station. The kaygryn clippers were being torn apart now. The remaining three hit the nearest Atlas-class MPV with close-range phase fire, but they had lost the element of surprise, and their atomics were stopped in their tracks by defensive laser batteries.
Fourteen seconds later and the last of the kaygryn clippers was nothing more than radioactive cinders cooling in the void.
‘Engagement over,’ Horst breathed and pulled the headset off. His baseball cap came off with it, and he dumped them both on the console. They both sat in silence for a few minutes, watching as the crusade fleet repositioned. After a while, the provari LRIS stopped, and the alarms holos faded to nothing.
Horst cleared his throat. ‘We’ve got ten hours until we get anything back from command,’ he said, watching as the computer finished streaming its own vastly superior interpretation of the alien engagement back to UNIS. ‘You want to hit the capsule?’
‘No,’ Javik said and pulled two sachets of whisky out of his console drawer. ‘What I want now is a drink.’
I
EXIGENCY
‘The opportunity to secure ourselves against defeat lies in our own hands, but the opportunity of defeating the enemy is provided by the enemy himself.’
UVOLON
‘As humans and citizens of the UN, you have a birth right. You have the right to a home; the right to an education; the right to food, and to drink. The right to security. These things we will provide you with, free of any charge, without any expectation or requirement. We ask nothing in return. These things, these gifts, are yours to do with what you will. But I urge you never to forget that everything comes at a price, no matter how remote it may be or how inconsequential it may seem. This is not a zero-sum game.’
Undersecretary Brandon Williams, addressing the UN after signing the Treaty of Hadan’s Reach
The air was hot and thick and smelled of storm. For most of the day the sky had been a perfect, unbroken cerulean; now, as late afternoon gave way to evening, a black thunderhead was gathering.
Ben Vondur sat on the beach, watching languorously as the swollen, rain-pregnant clouds approached. For a short while he contemplated staying. He had been on the beach for most of the day, listening to the hypersled broadcast and steadily making his way through a pack of chemically chilled beers. A long, low peal of thunder, however, put paid to the idea. It lingered in the charged air like a drum roll, the bass of it shaking him. Irritably, he waved off the holo and sat up.
It wasn’t difficult to feel isolated on Anternis. A small UN nation on an otherwise alien world, it formed an unimportant scimitar of tropical land protruding from the underbelly of Vos’Shan, the larger and considerably more populous kaygryn state that lay to the north. Together they made up the only two countries on the otherwise uninhabited world of Uvolon, itself a minor planet in a sector of space two hundred light years from Vargonroth. For Captain Vondur it was soft detachment, technically a military deployment, but in reality a holiday with only the most cursory of duties to undertake. He and the rest of his squadron had done little more than spend five months firing railguns in a leased desert range a thousand kilometres north.
He gathered up his things as the first of the rain fell, a few fat drops of cold water splattering the sand by his feet. Within minutes it had gone from light to torrential, accompanied by crackling lightning and deep peals of thunder. Unperturbed by the tropical storm, Vondur reached the end of the beach and crested a shallow sand dune covered in scrub. Just beyond lay the ring road, a wide, six-lane highway, a mixture of metalled asphalt and railway track junctioned by a dozen accessways running arrow-straight into the city. From orbit it formed a near-perfect circle, the accessways making it look not unlike a crosshair.
The ring road was, like the beach, largely deserted save a few distant tankers and a solitary express train. He ambled slowly across, feeling the heat of the road through his sandals despite the cool rain. He made straight for a civilian parking bay where his transport was, a battered four-wheel jeep branded with the UN insignia. Well beyond, perhaps another five kilometres away, lay the City of Anternis, a UN-basic, predesigned metropolis carved out of the bedrock by orbital construction rigs years before. It languished at fifty per cent capacity. After the Treaty of Hadan’s Reach, kaygryn terrorism had meant that, as well as requiring a permanent military presence, Anternis had been shedding colonists by the thousands for the last five decades. It was one of the reasons, Vondur concluded, why the place was so boring.
A long, low rumble broke him from his reverie, for the only reason that it wasn’t thunder. Frowning, he searched the sky for the source of the noise. The atmosphere over Anternis was relatively clear, with only a couple of air transports visible, though it took a few moments of searching before he saw it: a large kaygryn corvette, flying at what looked to be an illegally low altitude over the city. As the rain cleared slightly, he could see that the corvette was being escorted by a host of UN combat drones, all blaring with warning lights. A shot of adrenaline fired through his system as he briefly entertained the thought of the ship attacking the city, but it did not take long for the corvette to clear it and make for the open ocean. The noise of its atmospheric engines was tremendous as it passed almost directly overhead, rattling the glass awning over Vondur and triggering his automatic audio filters to prevent damage to his hearing.
Seen from just ten thousand feet, the craft was spectacular. It was formed of a three-hundred-metre, half-torus shape, covered in gun emplacements and with two bulky engine units at the open end, currently burning white-hot and emitting exhaust in the order of tonnes per second. Such a large vessel was not designed for extended intra-atmosphere aviation and it had perhaps twenty or thirty minutes’ worth of liquid fuel before it would crash. Vondur watched agape as the ship soared overhead and changed trajectory so that as it reached the seafront it began to climb. Despite being so high above, the increase in air turbulence was palpable, manifesting itself in hot, fast winds that drove the rain hard into him, stinging his bare skin.
