Reclamation (Book One of the Art of War Trilogy), page 11
‘Genocide. The word you’re looking for is genocide.’
Garrick cleared his throat. ‘I think attempted genocide might be more–’
‘Never mind,’ Josette snapped, making him start. He cursed internally.
‘That was idiotic,’ he tried, but she waved him quiet. Whatever the contingency was, she wasn’t going to tell him about it now.
They sat in silence for a full minute while Garrick did his best to think of something to talk about. Eventually, he came up with, ‘Speaking of the kaygryn… do we know any more about that corvette that got junked?’
Josette shook her head slowly. ‘UNIS’s Anternis station is pulling all the recoverable data from the destroyed module. There’s tonnes of intel – even with dedicated VI scrubbers, it’s going to be hours before we can review it.’
‘Mm,’ Garrick said. ‘No doubt will be an interesting read.’
‘No doubt,’ Josette nearly sneered, with what was evidently another spike in irritability. ‘Karl Howarth is already talking about picking up known kaygryn for questioning. It’s like international law means nothing any more.’ She paused as she checked her IHD. ‘We’re needed in the ops room.’
Garrick nodded, annoyed he’d abjectly failed to toe the line with her. He threw back the last of his tepid coffee and they exited the mess.
It was a short, brisk walk back up the stairs, and they spent it in silence. The now familiar guards remained outside the door, scanning them silently. They entered the room to see the President sat at the head of the table, his head resting on his palms. In one hand was a kerchief, damp with brow sweat.
‘This “exercise” by the kaygryn,’ he said, not lifting his head. ‘You say it was pre-planned?’
‘According to Commander Vance, yes,’ General Pike said. ‘Sir, it looks as though the kaygryn were within their own borders when they were hit. On the strict letter of the law, they aren’t even obliged to inform us.’
‘Though presumably they’d be stupid not to.’
‘Presumably,’ Scarcroft said, his voice smooth.
‘What do you think happened here, Strike Commander? Let’s get a fresh opinion, shall we?’ the President said.
Garrick looked briefly perplexed. ‘I’ve not been made aware of the most recent developments,’ he lied and inwardly praised himself for his quick thinking.
‘Varren, apprise the man,’ the President said impatiently.
‘The provar have fired on Vos’Shan,’ Scarcroft said. He was quite alive to the fact that Josette had already told him, even if the President wasn’t. Garrick wondered then if the fleet marshal knew about his affair with her.
‘Again?’ Garrick said, a parody of surprise.
‘Yes,’ Scarcroft said, his eyes narrowing slightly. ‘Into the borderlands. Four hundred kaygryn militia have been killed. It seems as though our man–’
‘Woman,’ Pike interjected.
‘Woman,’ Scarcroft repeated, ‘on the ground was killed. Our UNIS agent. At least, she is not accounted for.’
‘I think you’ll have trouble accounting for her,’ Garrick said, after a pause.
‘Never mind that. What do you think?’ the President asked.
‘Think about what, sir?’
‘The strike hitting the mission station? Of all the places!’ the President said, on the verge of shouting.
‘At this stage, sir, I’d venture that it’s an unfortunate coincidence.’ He noticed that Frost was watching him very intently from across the room. ‘The station is, after all, refraction shielded, is it not?’
‘It is,’ Frost spoke eventually, when no one else answered.
‘Well then. The provar couldn’t have seen it. Not unless they were scanning that specific area for a long time.’ Garrick shrugged. ‘To the contrary, they did see the militia – were they armed with any kind of STO capability?’
‘Yes,’ Frost said, tersely.
‘Then I think the answer is rather obvious, isn’t it? The provar thought nothing of shooting a corvette out of the sky; why would they think twice about killing hostile militia with orbit-capable weaponry?’
‘I agree,’ Pike rumbled. ‘It’s too soon to be second-guessing these things. I think for the sake of the safety of Anternis, we should treat this as an unfortunate accident.’
‘Of course, it will remain an unfortunate secret accident,’ Scarcroft said. The President looked up to face him. ‘After all,’ the fleet marshal turned to Frost, ‘your position there was illegal, yes?’
‘Yes,’ Frost replied, unfazed.
Silence descended on the room.
‘Christ,’ Aurelius said quietly. ‘I can’t have this escalating. We’re supposed to be defusing the situation.’
‘With respect, sir, it is not an escalation, not as long as we refuse to acknowledge it as such.’ This time it was McKone speaking. ‘General Pike is correct. For the moment we should treat this as an accident. If the provar were somehow aware of the mission station there, and killed our agent deliberately, then I should expect more “coincidences” to follow shortly. Their intention as regards UN forces will soon become apparent.’
‘How do you mean?’ the President asked, clearly irritated.
‘The arrival of the naval task force at Uvolon,’ McKone replied.
‘If they attack the fleet, it will be an act of war,’ the President rumbled.
‘Precisely my point, sir.’ McKone bowed.
Aurelius made a frustrated gesture with his hand. ‘So we do nothing?’
‘No,’ several people said at once.
‘We still have a UNIS operation on Anternis, run by Karris Haig. The Tiberean station broadcasts data to the Vadian Mission Station automatically, every sixty minutes,’ Frost said before anyone else could speak. ‘It is also backed up on Anternis, on servers beneath the UNAF base. Assuming we can recover all the data from Anternis itself, we’ll get everything up to the second before the KRS hit. If not, the most intel we’ll lose is an hour’s worth. That might give us some clues as to why the kaygryn attacked the crusade fleet and why the station was hit – if it was intentional, and if the two are linked.’
Aurelius nodded. ‘All right. Frost, Howarth… where is she… Josette, I want you three personally to oversee the intelligence recovery. You have complete discretion.’
‘Yes, sir,’ they muttered in near unison.
‘I need to speak to my communications officers,’ the President said, more to himself than anybody else. ‘I should address the public, and the Ascendancy, thinking about it. Broadcast on all networks. If our missives haven’t penetrated the provari embassies on our intentions, then perhaps a public broadcast will do the trick. The press are all over this, I take it?’
‘Interest is spreading through United Information,’ McKone said. ‘A few more hours and this will be headline news on most worlds.’
‘Right,’ Aurelius said. ‘In which case, you are all dismissed. Let’s reconvene once our man reaches Gonvarion.’
*
Vondur had ZEN package the head carefully in an ammunition crate, then waited for the medevac. It arrived ten minutes after he had called for it, in the form of a battered olive-green UNAF Medical Corps shuttle. He launched up to meet it with a burst of thrust, and, avoiding the air intakes, handed the crate over to one of the medics leaning out of the open cargo hold.
‘Is this it?’ the medic asked over a private channel.
‘That’s it,’ Vondur replied.
The medic opened up the crate and took the head out while Vondur moved back so that he wasn’t interfering with the shuttle’s stability.
‘What’s her status?’ Vondur asked, as the shuttle spun slowly about on its horizontal axis and headed back to Anternis.
‘It’s… still in good condition,’ the medic replied, sounding preoccupied. ‘Can’t speak for her psychological state, but medically, everything that we would like to see intact is intact.’
‘Okay. Keep me posted,’ Vondur replied.
There was a pause. ‘I’ve been ordered to keep the matter NTK, sir.’
Vondur was already back on the ground, Goliath squelching into the muddy jungle floor. ‘Keep me posted, private,’ he repeated, irritably.
Another pause. ‘Yes, sir.’
Vondur terminated the channel and absentmindedly reviewed the incoming data from the squadron’s active drones. There was nothing new. He had his Goliath perform a biological mass scan, then laughed at his own stupidity when the entire jungle lit up. He cancelled the readout.
‘So, what was that all about?’ Jarvin asked a few moments later, via a private channel.
‘I don’t know,’ Vondur replied truthfully. ‘Though I’m not sure I like the idea of a base controller – hell, anyone – being unwilling to recover a human casualty.’
‘Exactly,’ Jarvin replied. ‘There must be a reason.’
‘There is a reason. Just not a very good one.’ Vondur was aware that, despite it being a private channel, it would not be impossible to hack with UNIS-grade technology – and this had UNIS written all over it. He maximised the encryption to deter the casual hacker.
‘Do you think it was something to do with that KRS?’ Jarvin asked.
Vondur nodded to himself. ‘Likely. We probably had assets in the area. Got blitzed. She can’t have been out here for long; she’d have been picked up by now.’
‘Or not,’ Jarvin remarked.
Vondur was about to reply but paused as an incoming-message icon winked in the corner of his vision. ‘Hold on,’ he said and sidelined the private feed. ‘This is Gatekeeper Actual, go ahead.’
‘Gatekeeper, this is First Light. We have orders to relieve you at oh-three-hundred. You’re being reassigned to Anternis, confirm copy over.’
Vondur frowned and checked the time. They still had hours left on the clock. ‘Copy, First Light. Anything else?’
‘Negative, Gatekeeper. First Light out.’
The channel closed, and he re-linked with Jarvin on a wideband channel. ‘We’re being relieved by first battalion at 3 a.m.’
‘Troops?’ Jarvin replied. ‘Why?’
‘I don’t know,’ Vondur replied.
‘Probably because it’s dead out here,’ Cox said. Vondur watched him launch into the air in the distance and slowly descend back into the jungle. ‘Can’t see shit, sir.’
‘Use the drones, Sergeant; stop making yourself a target,’ Jarvin said irritably.
‘I’m fluorescent orange, sir! A blind man on the moon could hit me with a stream of piss!’
The net erupted with laughter.
‘Can it,’ Vondur snapped, and the laughter abruptly stopped. The business with the head of that woman had soured his mood.
They spent the next few hours in silence, idly trudging up and down the border. By one o’clock the rain had lightened off, and in another hour it had stopped completely. The mountain passes remained defiantly clear of refugees; in fact, the city seemed to be in a state of near-total lockdown. The drones’ continual surveillance showed almost no activity.
By three o’clock Vondur had almost completely forgotten about the provari cruiser sitting hundreds of kilometres above them – or would have if there wasn’t a constant, pulsing warning graphic on his HUD informing him that he and his squadron were being actively targeted.
‘Blues approaching from the south,’ Syoba said.
Vondur blinked a few times and amplified his scanners to see three troop carriers making a beeline for their position. A negligibly invasive diagnostic informed him that almost the entire battalion was being deployed, nearly two hundred men.
‘They’re deploying in force, then,’ Jarvin snorted. ‘Did no one tell them there’s nothing to do out here?’
‘Get ready to move out,’ Vondur relayed tiredly and recalled ZEN. He received a further transmission from First Light – this time an HUD marker informing him of the exact location of their objective. He sent it to the rest of the squadron via a wideband transmission.
‘Anternis General Hospital?’ Cox asked.
‘Ours is not to question why,’ Vandemarr replied.
‘Still,’ Jarvin said, powering up his Goliath’s plasmastats. ‘You can’t say this isn’t odd.’
‘No,’ Vondur murmured to himself, ‘you can’t.’
*
The journey to Gonvarion, thanks to the VR sync, was actually rather enjoyable. Given the near-endless number of programs available and the sync’s variable time perception, Yano was able to partake both in the immeasurable debauchery of Ultraporn and the ferocious violence of interactive war games, back to back, in what in real time would be the blink of an eye.
Of course, every time the voidbreaker exited a jump he was bombarded with diplomatic cables – many from Xander McKone himself – and had intragalactic political reports to review, the latest Protocol legislation to revise, and when all of that was done, there was the good old-fashioned news to watch.
The latter had been the easiest to keep track of. United Information, one of the only UN-wide news channels, had dedicated, round-the-clock coverage of ‘The Anternis Crisis’ – though they had already been reduced to repeatedly showing the same five-minute montage of footage since almost all comms were being blocked by the provar. In between the low-quality images of a kaygryn ship being obliterated, there were also interviews with former and serving UNAF personnel, including one ex-Goliath commander who reeled off some impressive statistics about the machines, and an alleged ‘provar expert’, who even spoke the language.
Of course, the most engrossing coverage was about him. That had taken him slightly by surprise, partly due to the speed at which United Information had found out about the summit, and more specifically his presence there, and partly due to the large Exigency Corps portrait of him they were showing behind the newsreader. In all likeliness, they had already wangled it so a reporter was embedded in the diplomatic team.
‘In response to the crisis as we’ve already said, we can now confirm that Xander McKone, the head of the United Nations Diplomatic Ministry, will be deploying the Exigency Corps Xeno Division to Gonvarion, and we understand that leading this team will be Special Envoy Zavian Yano, pictured behind me.
‘Special Envoy Yano is well known for his work during and after the Insurrection on Merisgard, and despite being one of the youngest members of the prestigious Xeno Division, superiors have described him as “uniquely talented”.
‘The crisis on Anternis comes just months ahead of the UN presidential election, and is seen by many political commentators as the first real test of Tier-Three relations since the Treaty of Hadan’s Reach fifty years ago. The Treaty, which ceded surplus UN territory to the Provar Ascendancy in exchange for scarce resources, remains a sore point in interspecies relations and is likely to colour talks on Gonvarion.
‘Our political correspondent, Natasha–’
He cancelled the feed and found himself floating in unconstructed VR space.
‘Christ,’ he whispered and exhaled loudly.
He checked the time to see that the voidbreaker had made a further two jumps since he last looked, the latter of which had taken them into the Zhahassi Commonwealth. They would likely make one more to reach Gonvarion, which itself was deep inside the Demilitarised Zone. The zhahassi were the only Tier-Three species to have reached their current technological plane without warfare and the means to effectively prosecute it being the main driving factor, making them natural diplomats.
He absentmindedly drew up a galaxy map and checked their progress from Bashik. Their estimated arrival time was in two hours, formed of one short jump and then forty minutes at point-five lightspeed through the solar system. While it would give him more than enough time to partake in several war games spanning weeks of relative time, he didn’t feel like it any more. Every time he thought about the upcoming summit, a shot of adrenaline coursed through his body uncomfortably, and his mind felt saturated by the news broadcasts and diplomatic cables.
No, he thought, he would spend the rest of the journey unconscious. He checked his IHD to see that there were no further pending messages, although he would invariably be inundated the moment they touched down. Once he was satisfied, he cleared his vision of all his IHD clutter and had the capsule knock him out.
He awoke after what felt like three seconds, to find they had arrived.
RETRIBUTION
‘This is a victor’s justice, nothing more. I do not repent. Release me now and I would do it again a thousand times over.’ (trans.)
Executor Iourix, after being sentenced to death for the massacre at Beng’Tusk
It took them just over twenty hours and three jumps to successfully reach Uvolon. Rynn had wanted to do it in two, but the Retribution’s astrographic navigation suite had been misaligned at the last moment by a gravity well three thousand light years from Navem Sigma, causing them to abort at the last second. Still, twenty hours was not unreasonable and within operational parameters. They had managed to exit jumpspace much closer to Uvolon than originally planned as well.
They emerged from the event horizon a million kilometres from the upper atmosphere and immediately accelerated to point-one lightspeed. The Seraph and the York closed to formation, maintaining a two-hundred-kilometre perimeter, and within a minute they had made a high-velocity pass through Uvolon’s high-orbit band, sowing decoy pods and hundreds of microsatellites in their wake.
‘Smith, let’s have voidar on our cruiser, please,’ Rynn said, searching the astrographic sphere around them for any sign of the provar. The Retribution made another high-G pass through the low-orbit band, dispensing more pods. They would have the effect of confusing enemy voidar and proliferating gibberish across all foreign wideband comms.
