Reclamation (Book One of the Art of War Trilogy), page 13
‘Fire at will,’ Rynn said, now slightly giddy with excitement. Burkhart did exactly that, bringing up thousands of firing solutions on the astrograph and unleashing a swarm of ordnance. Immediately the space around the Retribution and the Seraph filled with micro event horizons, and salvos of missiles slid into hyperspace and re-materialised around the Impraxes. Although nuclear weapons had little impact in space beyond their EMP, Star Witch was a robotic, VI-powered shaped-charge that would laser through the hull of an enemy warship before detonating, creating catastrophic overpressure that simply burst the ship apart like a water balloon.
Their VL sensors fuzzed as the Impraxes activated its defensive quad-powered laser batteries and destroyed or deflected all of their missiles. A few cursory shots raked the Retribution, but it was nothing its force shielding couldn’t handle.
The UN destroyers shot past the Impraxes, giving it a wide, hundred-thousand-kilometre berth, and battered it with hypervelocity flak from their rail cannons. Solid shot was much more effective against defensive lasers, and the effect was instantaneous. Rynn watched on the infrared feed as the Impraxes’ shields overloaded from the kinetic energy and its armoured nanoform hull cratered from multiple impacts. In some places, he could make out venting gas where they had punctured the armour entirely.
‘Good hit,’ Rynn said. ‘Smith, bring us back around. Burkhart, stay on the railguns but keep up the pressure with Star Witch.’
‘Missiles are down at sixty-five per cent, sir,’ Burkhart said as another salvo went. One of the missiles managed to get close enough to activate its cutting laser before it was turned to junk by a spray of chaff.
‘Incoming,’ Dieter said, his face glowing red from the warning graphics on his screen. ‘Sentrax online.’
Had they not been in the VR sync they would have felt the vibrations from the Retribution’s sentry guns as they whittled away at the cloud of ordnance approaching from the Impraxes. Proximity alarms – by far the most disconcerting – also stuttered into life intermittently as an event horizon sparked into existence nearby and disgorged its thermonuclear payload.
Rynn watched on the astrograph as another cloud of flak lanced towards the twisting, spiralling Impraxes. Compared to the destroyers, it was painfully slow, but they dared not venture too close for fear of falling foul of its close-range batteries.
‘Bring us round again,’ he said to Smith, and the Retribution streaked past Uvolon’s terminator and straight towards the sun. Another high-G pass and another broadside saw them score two more hits on the provar cruiser – before a nuke was displaced inside the hull of the Seraph.
‘It was an hon–’ Aulden managed before the blast vaporised him. The Seraph shattered like burning glass plunged into ice water and vanished into the void in an expanding cloud of radioactive dust and plasma.
The command sphere of the Retribution fell silent. The destroyer soared through the high-orbit band and put Uvolon between them and the Impraxes, and Smith quietly cleared his throat. ‘Shall I bring her back around, sir?’
It was at that point that Rynn realised the astrograph was still screaming with alarms. ‘Would somebody turn that damn noise off,’ he said, bringing his hands up to his temples. How had this happened? How had he let it happen? He brought his hands down to his sides and clenched them into fists. ‘Burkhart, prepare the entire battery for deployment.’ He wanted to hit the cruiser, to kill its crew. He wanted them to die painfully. Christ, if this had been a provari world, he would have nuked it in anger by now.
‘Aye, sir,’ his first officer said. Rynn’s IHD informed him that their entire contingent of Star Witch was ready to launch.
‘Inform the marines to prepare for launch as well,’ he said. That drew some looks, though he didn’t acknowledge them.
‘Aye, sir,’ Burkhart replied and did so. It would be utter suicide to dispatch marines against the Impraxes, and he knew it. But if the provar could displace a nuke inside a destroyer moving at a third of the speed of light, then what chance did they realistically have?
The Retribution shot out from behind Uvolon, bristling with weaponry, spoiling for a fight. Except that the Impraxes had vanished again, leaving nothing but ghost signals pinging across their voidar.
‘Oh for Christ’s sake!’ Rynn swore, thumping the railing in front of him. However, it meant their FTL comms array was working again. ‘Rankin, inform base of the situation immediately. Tell them the provar have murdered my men and violated Galactic Naval Protocol. Tell them they are in flagrant breach of international law and that they must be fucking ruined, understand?’ he spat.
‘Yes, sir,’ Rankin said and began to relay the message. Rynn surveyed the astrograph. The provari cruiser was nowhere to be seen; even its decoys were giving off weak and obviously false signals. The Retribution’s discrimination programs had no trouble in singling out the junk chatter and eliminating it.
‘Where are you, you son of a bitch?’ he said through gritted teeth. The astrograph chimed to inform him that it had finished gathering all the information available on the demise of the York, ready for his perusal. The thought infuriated him, and he cancelled the reminder from his IHD.
They made several more high-G passes of the equator, engaging LRIS on anything that moved, but there was nothing, not even the tell-tale high-energy signature of a recent event horizon.
‘Where are you…?’ Rynn said again, this time whispering.
The Impraxes’ railguns hit them before the Retribution had even picked up the power bloom of its mass drivers.
‘Gah!’ Rynn managed, flinching violently as half the astrograph – and half the crew – vanished in a blaze of poorly rendered VR graphics.
He screamed. The command sphere resembled a smashed disco ball, with jagged slivers of software buzzing and crackling and failing to produce anything useful. Dieter and Rankin had gone, as well as the lower half of Smith, whose intestines were currently being rendered as sickeningly cuboidal blocks of red. His torso hovered in the air fifteen centimetres above his chair, a look of abject confusion etched across his face as his hands passed through the empty space where his stomach and thighs should have been.
‘Captain,’ he said woozily, looking over to Rynn. ‘I think they’ve killed me.’ He disappeared as his capsule was automatically ejected from the ship.
The command sphere was wailing now like a wounded animal. He managed to decipher from the crippled VI that the ship was cartwheeling into deep space, though much more slowly than before given that the impact from the provari railguns had robbed the Retribution of much of its forward momentum. All of the marines had been killed, torn to bloody ribbons by the cloud of flak that had been blasted through the ship like a shotgun firing through an orange. It was nothing short of a miracle that he had not been killed; his body, buried deep in the diamond-armoured core, had not even been hit, his IHD informed him.
‘How… did this happen?’ Burkhart said, staring ahead of him, his voice laden with melancholy. He had managed to fire off their entire magazine of Star Witch, which impressed Rynn somewhere in the back of his mind, though none of it had made it through the Impraxes’ defences.
The first officer’s VR avatar fuzzed and disappeared as his capsule ejected from the ship too, heading for Uvolon. Rynn suddenly felt very alone.
He checked the engagement counter. From beginning to end, they had been in Uvolon’s orbit for less than three minutes, and the engagement itself had lasted in the region of twenty seconds of real time. He snorted. One of the longest engagements he had ever been in. He liked to think they had made a worthy adversary.
His capsule ejected automatically a few seconds later, and he was snapped violently from the VR sync back into the cramped, dark and claustrophobic interior of the gel-filled capsule. He writhed briefly inside his stifling pressure suit as the worst of the disorientation passed, until his IHD calmed him and produced for him a screen tracking his progress towards Uvolon. By its current speed and trajectory, he would hit the upper atmosphere in three hours before parachuting gently down to Anternis – although the Impraxes was obliged under international law to recover him.
Instead, it dispatched a bioterminator drone.
Supposedly a relic of the altogether more violent, though bygone, age of Contact, the drone’s only function was to seek out escaped biological matter in the aftermath of a naval engagement and terminate it. The drone had a variety of means at its disposal, but the most widely reviled and prevalent was to latch on to the mass in question and physically rip it apart until it no longer functioned.
The provar were the strongest proponent of their use, officially only as a deterrent, though historically they had frequently dispatched entire swarms of them into crippled kaygryn battlefleets and refugee flotillas. They had been accordingly classed as a Terror Weapon under Galactic Naval Protocol and banned, though like many GNP rules, the prohibition was widely ignored, and most modern warships carried them. Still, their use now was sufficiently rare that they had acquired an almost mythical status, so much so that Rynn had never seriously countenanced the possibility that he, as a human, would ever be the target of one. To discover that not only were they real but that one was now honing in on his escape capsule was so terrifying a sensation that it was physically painful to experience.
Beep.
The terminator forcibly synced with his IHD and began transmitting its approach countdown. He writhed inside the pod again, but the gel was so viscous it was like trying to sprint through treacle. He tried screaming, but even in his terrified state, he knew deep in the back of his mind that such was pointless.
Beep.
His pressure suit became a reservoir of hot sweat. His bowels relaxed, despite the Herculean efforts of his IHD, and the frequency of his breathing increased to the point of hyperventilation.
He thought of his family. That made him wail in anguish. He wanted to be at home, on Bospen, with his wife and two sons, not soaring through the cold, empty void, hundreds of thousands of kilometres from anyone, about to be–
Beep beep.
He screamed again, a long wail that ended in angry tears. He willed the capsule to travel faster. He tried thrashing about again and felt overwhelmingly claustrophobic.
Beep beep beep.
He cried. He cried and cried. This was not why he had joined the Fleet. No one seriously expected to die like this when they joined. The navy was supposed to be a jolly, a laugh; you wore the uniform and you flew warships and had fabulous dinners and parties. This was not it. This was not it.
Beep beep beep beep beep beep – thud.
The noise of the drone latching on to the capsule hull was more than he could bear. He would have shit and pissed himself right then if the suit would have allowed it. The tearing, drilling sound of the drone’s cutting tools seared through the capsule, amplified by the gel, rattling his brain.
He ordered his IHD to seal off all his sensory nerves. If he was going to be killed, it would at least happen painlessly. He suddenly thought of a group of provar huddled round a holo, watching from a remote optical feed as the drone slid into the gel, cheering and whooping and celebrating his death. He wasn’t sure where the thought had come from.
The hard, unfiltered light of Uvolon’s sun speared into the capsule as the drone peeled back the metal like petals from a flower. It wasted no time in burrowing into his stomach. He squeezed his eyes shut, his throat closing with horror, willing himself to die faster. He could feel the squid-like drone painlessly dicing his organs.
‘It’s not so bad,’ he whispered, feeling his gullet fill with blood.
His IHD was alive with foreign-body warning graphics now. They clamoured for attention across his vision, physiological representations of his body flashing in and out of existence surrounded by simultaneously frantic and dispassionate text.
He closed his eyes, feeling himself unplug from life.
‘It’s not so bad,’ he whispered, his breath rasping. Blood filled his mouth.
It’s not so bad, he thought, and then the drone scurried up his spine and scrambled his brain.
II
TIER THREE
‘All warfare is based on deception.’
HEAD START
‘No one is dead until I’m through with them. Bring me half a brain and I’ll get you something out of it.’
Attributed to Field Surgeon Argus von Vox, during the battle of Rawdon’s Wake
‘Good morning, Miss Staerck.’
She awoke to see a man in a white lab coat and a pair of spectacles – the latter doubtless an affectation – enter the bedroom through the main door, carrying a clipboard. He sat down on the chaise longue at the foot of the bed and rested one leg across the other, revealing a pair of red-and-blue striped socks. He noted something down on the clipboard, nodded to himself and then the clipboard vanished.
‘I am Doctor Lee.’
So, unless the man was an accomplished magician as well, she was in VR sync. ‘Good, uh, morning,’ she said, startled at the clarity of her own voice. She had expected something a little… raspier. ‘I’m alive,’ she remarked and was quite pleased about it.
‘Very much so,’ Doctor Lee replied, flashing a grin of brilliant white teeth. He also had grey hair, she noticed – doubtless another affectation, since no one had grey hair any more. In fact, he was visibly elderly, though perhaps seasoned would have been a better choice of word. ‘You have the Mantix Corporation to thank for that.’
She frowned. Of course, the suit. She had been wearing a suit, Mantix – UNIS issue. She struggled to remember more, but her mind refused to co-operate, pushing back against her. It was like pressing against the skin of a balloon: initially easy, then progressively harder. Her confusion must have been palpable because Doctor Lee frowned in turn and made a soft tutting sound.
‘Don’t try to think too hard for the moment. The memories will return. An unfortunate consequence of mild cerebral hypoxia, though entirely treatable, given time.’ He offered a reassuring smile.
She ran her hands across the sheets bunched up about her thighs, mulling this over. ‘What is mild cerebral hypoxia?’ she asked slowly. Usually she would have just consulted her IHD, since it contained, like everyone’s, the UN Library, the most vast and comprehensive source of knowledge in the galaxy. But for the first time in her life, it did not seem to be working. The experience was a deeply unsettling one, as if part of herself, her mind, had been amputated.
‘Parts of your brain were starved of oxygen following your decapitation,’ Doctor Lee said, as though it were nothing more trivial than an insect bite. ‘The Mantix helmet is designed to displace oxygen to whatever blood remains within the cranium, but more often than not there simply isn’t enough blood to properly oxygenate.’ Another reassuring, if slightly lopsided smile. ‘Consequently the helmet prioritises. Nine times out of ten, the parts of the brain which make you you are recovered completely undamaged. I’m pleased to report that you are one of those nine.’
She breathed deeply. She knew she had lost her head, though that in itself would have been difficult to believe even if it wasn’t currently attached to a body, since decapitation, on an intrinsic level and quite irrespective of modern medical and military technology, still seemed quite un-survivable. She couldn’t, however, seem to recall the manner in which she had come to be decapitated and trying to do so was evidently futile.
‘Where am I?’ she asked. It seemed like the next obvious question.
Doctor Lee reclined slightly. ‘Your head is in the United Nations Armed Forces base on Anternis. In the medical bay,’ he added, as if that had not been obvious. ‘As is probably apparent, this is a computer simulation generated from our installation processors. I have not been informed of how you came to sustain your injuries. Apparently that is… classified.’ A flicker of annoyance creased his brow as he said the last part. ‘Still, you are doing well, very well in fact. You have been physiologically conditioned quite expertly. A civilian head would take closer to a month to take to a new body. I estimate that you will be fully repaired within a few weeks – though only physically speaking of course.’ He smiled again, that same, perfect-teeth smile, and it was at that point she realised that it was quite possible that Doctor Lee was not a real person. It certainly accounted for his appalling bedside manner.
‘Are you a VI?’ she asked. It sounded much ruder than she had intended, and she did not really care whether he was or not. She just wished he would stop being so cavalier about her having been – for all intents and purposes – killed.
Doctor Lee snorted, perhaps with incredulity, though it was difficult to tell. ‘No, Miss Staerck, I am as real as you,’ he said, his gaze suddenly on his feet. He folded his arms. ‘I do have a personality construct, but I thought it would be best to speak to you in person, at least initially.’
‘Oh,’ she replied, suddenly embarrassed. The doctor looked visibly uncomfortable as well, though that was forgivable. It was probably rather unpleasant to be mistaken for a robot.
‘I’m sorry,’ she began, but Doctor Lee held up a finger.
‘Not to worry,’ he said, and he was back to his chipper self as quickly as if someone had flicked a switch in the back of his brain. ‘Now, as I say, I suspect it will be another fortnight before we are through with you. Your body was recovered, but unfortunately the process of decomposition is a swift one and with the damage to the rest of the suit, it was easier to dispose of it entirely and bring a fresh body out of storage.’
Lyra promptly retched violently. Given that the VR sync only translated largely exterior human components for efficiency, her stomach was empty, saving the bedspread from a sudden stream of vomit. Still, the process of dry heaving in virtual reality was as unpleasant as it was in real life, and it took a minute of grasping and perspiring before her guts unclenched and the feeling passed. It was another reason to lament the absence of her IHD, which could have easily overridden the muscle contractions.
