Reclamation (Book One of the Art of War Trilogy), page 18
He watched his radar as the squadron’s neat chevron formation dissolved into a swirling ballet of icons, each member breaking ranks to follow their pre-planned insertion vectors. Ten seconds out, Vondur traded a brief blurt of comms with the hospital air traffic controller, then exchanged out his main thrusters for the Goliath’s plasma retro-burners, which brought him to a controlled, if slightly heavy, stop. He released ZEN on landing, who walked across to the far end of the plaza and took up position on the near side of the uplink building. High above he could see Cox, his luminescent orange armour panels easily marking him out amidst the altitude warning lights, satellite dishes and antennae of the tower roof.
‘I’m down,’ he said curtly over the wideband as per protocol, the paving of the plaza sinking slightly under the tonnage of the Goliath. A suite of external conditions scans revealed nothing untoward, and he allowed himself to relax slightly.
The plaza was a hundred metres across at its widest, hexagonal in shape and hemmed in on three sides by the hospital towers. It was a pleasant space, tree-lined and with a large water feature in the centre. It was bathed in light from the surrounding buildings, and he could see that despite the city being in a state of lockdown, the hospital was still bustling with activity. Indeed, the traumatic injuries ward was probably busier than it had been in a long time, thanks to the mass panic caused by the provari cruiser. If what he’d seen the day before was anything to go on, then the medical technicians would be wrestling with all manner of cases from vehicle collisions to crushing and suffocation in the orbital bombardment shelters.
He took a few steps, getting a feel for the area. Already he was drawing a lot of attention. He could see people in the windows of the traumatic injuries ward looking down at him and pointing, and medical technicians and patients alike stared as they hurried through the plaza. He couldn’t blame them. Most UN worlds were strangers to both the personnel and hardware of UNAF, which seemed to exist as occasional features on news broadcasts where some brushfire conflict had ignited between two irrelevant alien tribes. Indeed, most Veigis-Class worlds were open in their distaste for UNAF, which they described as jingoistic and a relic of the age of Contact. Well, they would be grateful for them soon enough.
He finished taking stock of the area. There wasn’t much of Anternis he hadn’t seen already, though admittedly most of it wasn’t through the enhanced targeting grid of a Goliath’s ocular display. The initial excitement of being deployed had long worn off, and in its place the stressful realities of modern combat weighed on his mind, embodied in the ACTIVE TARGET WARNING icon pulsing in the top of his display. It was like sitting in a room with someone pointing a loaded gun at his face. One wrong move and he’d have tenths of a second to react before a kinetic rail strike punched through the atmosphere with needlepoint accuracy and vaporised his luminescent orange Goliath – and a good deal of the hospital with it.
The wideband remained practically silent in the ensuing hours as the deep blue of the early morning slowly gave way to watery grey daylight and each member of the squadron trudged out his patrol sector with heavy, clanking footfalls. In the downtime, Vondur found his thoughts returning to the head of the woman again and again. They had clearly overturned a stone that someone, somewhere, had intended to be left undisturbed, and it was not beyond the realms of possibility that their physical removal from the Tiberean borderlands was a direct consequence of his actions in calling for a medevac. He had easily broken the hospital firewalls to access the inpatient register, and there were no VIPs and no persons of interest inside. The hospital itself was of no strategic significance beyond its central location and admittedly excellent sight lines. Why else relocate them from the border?
‘Gatekeeper, this is Thunderhead, over.’
His heart rate spiked at the suddenness of the transition. He checked the time. It was 5 a.m. local.
‘This is Gatekeeper Actual, go ahead,’ he replied, watching the plaza. It was a different comms controller, judging by the voice.
‘Just checking in. System shows you at the objective, grid five-five-two sigma, confirm please.’
Vondur checked his location marker. ‘Five-five-two sigma, on the money, Thunderhead.’
There was a few seconds’ pause. ‘Gatekeeper, be advised, we’ve had word from base command that naval evacuation procedures have been effected as of zero-four-thirty zulu. Anticipate heavy traffic in all civilian airspace sectors, how copy?’
‘Heavy traffic, copy,’ Vondur replied, absentmindedly pinging the local civil aviation control and recovering a live feed of the airspace. Already the map was crowded with blue lines showing logged trajectories of civilian transports.
‘That’s all for now. Sit tight, Gatekeeper. Thunderhead out.’ The channel terminated and Vondur cancelled the feed.
He thought for a few moments, then opened a feed to the local television network. After five minutes it was clear that they had nothing new. He wasn’t sure what he’d expected; the FTL comms array would have been liquidated along with everything else when the provar had junked all their orbital feeds. UNAF had a backup, but that was one link, and it was stuttered. Only comms flashes would come through, no two-way traffic. That was how it had been designed. The simpler it was, the more resilient it was.
He cancelled the television feed and cycled through his weapon systems, more out of habit than any genuine need to. All of them, save his CODOR drones, were locked at SAFE.
‘All, just be advised that they are running naval evacuation procedures citywide,’ he said over the squadron wideband. ‘We’re going to start seeing a lot of civilian birds in the next few hours. Keep an eye on the skies.’ He scanned the area again and spotted an executive landing platform two-thirds of the way up the xenopathology building, on the south-west side. ‘I am relocating. Read marker. Out.’
He broadcast an IHD marker of his new location, and with a short burst of thrust launched himself off the ground and on to the platform. He walked to the south end, avoiding a few sleek black cruisers parked there, and looked out across Anternis towards the ocean. Below, down the A5 highway, he could see one shelter already emptying into a temporary marshalling yard.
The tepid dawn gave way to a hot, tropical morning, and over the course of the next few hours, Anternis transformed from a state of lockdown to a hive of ordered chaos. Vondur was informed by the comms controller at 10 a.m. that the UNS Achilles, an old cosmic disaster contingency craft, was on its way to Uvolon and would be in orbit that evening. In the absence of any reassurance from the provar that they would stop prosecuting kaygryn targets in and around UN territory, all orbital bombardment shelters would be emptied over the course of the next few days and the population ferried to a staging ground a thousand kilometres south, closer to the equatorial salt flats where the large evacuation shuttles could land.
The squadron garnered a lot of attention throughout the day. Desperate for any kind of news, the local television news networks soon learned of their presence at the hospital and dispatched a small fleet of pressbots to film them standing around and doing nothing. A few members of the squadron watched the live coverage on and off, and occasionally someone would snigger over the wideband when a reporter made a comment or assumption that was well wide of the mark. Those who were based on the ground were approached by inquisitive members of the public or reporters, but after being invasively scanned by the Goliaths for any kind of hazardous material, they were roundly ignored. The civilians soon lost interest.
The squadron continued to patrol as morning transitioned into afternoon. Overhead, large civilian freighters and transports lumbered along their pre-logged flight vectors, picking up thousands of civilians from marshalling areas on the southern curve of the ring road and shuttling them south across the ocean. A full evacuation of Anternis, if it followed the letter of the naval procedure, would take three days, though the bulk of the population could be shifted in two. By nightfall, Vondur reckoned a hundred thousand, fully a quarter of the population, would have been transported to the huge temporary camps on the salt flats.
His comlink pipped at 2 p.m. local, after another hour of radio silence in which he’d reverted to targeting clouds and passing civilian traffic with his vambrace-mount railgun. He checked his HUD to see that it was Vance on an encrypted channel, audio-only.
‘Commander,’ he said, locking on to a scudding stratocumulus two kilometres away.
‘Captain, how is everything down there?’
‘Quiet,’ Vondur replied. ‘Very quiet. We’re in the centre of town, running limited oversight.’
‘Hmm, fine,’ Vance said dismissively. ‘There’s not a great deal we can do with you right now anyway. Listen, Ben, I’m being sent offworld to meet with Governor Lefebvre. He’s been away on Theyde and has missed most of the action, so they want me to brief him on his way in. SOC has the ops room locked down; my preference was to redeploy you south to the landing zone, but if you’re not there already then that’s probably been superseded.’
‘Nothing’s come in about moving further south,’ Vondur said, irritated that Vance had been locked out. Local command meant nothing when SOC and UNIS got involved. He didn’t like either of the comms controllers who had delivered their orders, both probably Vargonroth men.
‘One more thing to be aware of,’ Vance said. ‘Fleet Command has dispatched three destroyers from Navem Sigma to fly escort for our provari friends in orbit and oversee the evacuation. They’re due to arrive…’ There was a pause. ‘… sometime this evening, probably sixteen or seventeen hundred zulu. Ahead of the Achilles in any event.’
Vondur nodded to himself, idly toggling through his weapon systems. ‘The provar won’t like it. Do they know?’
‘Apparently. The President gave an address this morning.’
Vondur grunted. ‘It’s itchy enough already without having three Fleet destroyers on its back.’ He paused as a huge civilian freighter powered overhead. His passive scanner offered him a list of the inhabitants. ‘I don’t like it,’ he said, dismissing the feed.
‘I don’t like it any more than you do, Captain,’ Vance replied. He sounded weary. ‘Nothing to be done about it now.’
Vondur shrugged, and his Goliath shrugged with him. ‘No, sir,’ he said. Vance was right. It was out of their hands.
‘There will be a full debrief on my return. My safe passage offworld has been negotiated, though I can’t say I’m particularly looking forward to running the blockade. As you say, it’s twitchy up there.’
‘Yes, sir,’ he replied. He debated whether to raise the matter of the woman’s head but decided against it. There was no guarantee the channel was scrubbed. ‘Good luck,’ he added and meant it. If the Fleet were sending three destroyers, then it was about to get very crowded in orbit.
‘And to you. Knowing how these things tend to play out, I daresay it’ll all have blown over by tomorrow.’
The channel went dead, and Vondur cancelled the feed. He was left staring at the clouds through his targeting grid, driven across the sky by the cold ocean breeze. After a few minutes of reflection, he keyed in the wideband. ‘Alright, listen in. Commander Vance is being escorted offworld to meet the governor. SOC is taking over, same callsign. No change to orders at present. Be advised that we are expecting a Fleet presence this evening, three destroyers from Navem Sigma.’
There were a few exasperated sighs. ‘The President is sending in the Fleet?’ Cox growled. ‘They’ve forgotten New Carthage then. We’ll be pasted the minute those event horizons open.’
‘The orders won’t have come from the President; they’ll have come from Halo Arch,’ Vondur said, summoning in his voice a level of calm that was not forthcoming. ‘The provar know the Fleet is on its way to oversee the evacuation. Everybody just stay calm and sit tight. Watch your sectors. Sergeant Cox, get a drone above these clouds would you? And make sure it’s pinging recon and friendly, for Christ’s sake.’
‘Yes, sir,’ Cox replied. Vondur watched as the sergeant’s Goliath grabbed a CODOR drone from its spine nacelle, affixed it to the mass driver on his right vambrace and fired it vertically into the air. Vondur tracked it with his own enhanced optics, ensuring that it was actively broadcasting a reconnaissance-only signal. The Goliath’s VL sensors could penetrate through cloud cover without too much difficulty, though they would get a much clearer signal this way.
‘We’re online,’ Cox said, the second a crystal-clear tactical feed of the drone’s optics appeared in Vondur’s HUD. He manipulated the range so that, within a few seconds, he was looking into the deep, ink-black void of space. The drone had already picked up the cruiser in the low-orbit band, a three hundred-metre, rifle-shaped warship resplendent in sky-blue livery and bristling with ordnance pylons. Its main rail cannon battery was extended, a long, needle-like mass driver protruding from the bottom of the cruiser like a pinnacle of ice, glinting in the light from Uvolon’s sun. The drone tagged it in bright red graphics and downloaded a stream of data to the squadron for analysis.
‘That’s some serious firepower…’ Jarvin murmured.
‘Damn it, Sergeant, stop scanning it will you,’ Vondur snapped, and the feed abruptly terminated – though not before a partial diagnostic of the rail battery had been downloaded. He read the readout despite his anger, and after two minutes concluded with a weary sigh. The cruiser had enough ordnance in that sole weapons system to raze the entire surface of the planet.
‘All right, back to work,’ he said over the wideband, though he didn’t order the recall of the drone. Instead, he spent most of the afternoon watching the cruiser through its enhanced optics, idly wondering what the provar crew, tucked inside the gel-filled armoured core of the ship, were thinking.
The number of civilian transports shuttling through the sky increased throughout the day as the central bombardment shelters slowly disgorged their occupants and evacuation efforts moved to the outer sections of the city. By the early evening, as the sun was beginning to set and Anternis was bathed in brilliant orange light, the central shelters were largely empty, though there were still huge numbers of stragglers loitering along the accessways. Many were carrying heaps of personal possessions which directly contravened naval evacuation procedure, and Vondur smirked at the thought of their outrage as Mantix-clad controllers forcefully rid them of their belongings.
‘Ninety-eight thousand cleared, with another thirty thousand by midnight,’ Jarvin remarked over the wideband. ‘Rally points A through D are complete.’
‘Not bad,’ Cox said. ‘Still plenty I can see, though.’
‘Anyone who was due to report to A, B, C or D is now being told to go to E and F, apparently,’ Jarvin continued. ‘Imagine that. Wouldn’t want to be left behind.’
‘You’d be the first on,’ Cox said, and laughter filled the net. Even Vondur allowed himself a chuckle, though that was brought to a halting stop by the quiet whine of his CODOR alarm. Cox’s drone had registered three spacetime anomalies in Uvolon’s orbit.
‘Ah shit, here we go,’ the sergeant said, perfectly summing up the squadron’s thoughts on the matter.
‘Everybody stay calm, we are still locked on safe,’ Vondur said over the wideband. He watched the readouts from the drone feed for half a minute, then opened a direct feed to the UNAF base controller. ‘Thunderhead, this is Gatekeeper Actual, come in.’
The link fuzzed for a second. ‘This is Thunderhead, go ahead, Gatekeeper.’
‘Thunderhead be advised, we have identified three event horizons opening one million kilometres from Uvolon, how copy?’
‘Three event horizons, one million kilometres. That’s the quick-reaction force from Sigma, Gatekeeper. Sit tight. Out.’
Vondur cancelled the link irritably. ‘Son of a bitch,’ he muttered to himself.
‘Any orders, sir?’ Jarvin asked over a private link.
‘Sit tight for now,’ Vondur replied.
‘Blues, out of the hole,’ Cox said on the wideband. Vondur turned his attention back to the CODOR feed to see three UN-tagged ships exiting the event horizons at speed. The squadron fell silent for a few seconds.
‘Naval forces making high-velocity passes of the planet,’ Syoba observed to no one in particular.
There was a minute’s pause.
‘Those are combat manoeuvres,’ Jarvin murmured. The destroyers, marked out by the drone as bright blue dots, were travelling at point-one lightspeed through the orbit bands – far too fast for the naked eye, though just about traceable through highly enhanced optics. With advanced trajectory-mapping and a working knowledge of naval exercises, it was clear that the quick-reaction force was sparring.
‘Where have the provar gone?’ Vandemarr asked suddenly. Vondur felt his heart rate spike. He checked his HUD. The active target warning icon had disappeared – as had the cruiser.
‘No event horizon,’ he said.
‘It’s cloaked. Must have,’ Syoba said.
Vondur called up his squadron schematic. Everyone’s weapon systems were reading as safe. ‘Everybody stay locked to safe,’ he said anyway. They were the only things on the planet currently capable of inflicting damage on the cruiser; the last thing he wanted to do was make the squadron a target again.
‘Christ,’ someone said. Vondur turned back to the CODOR feed. The destroyers were jinking all over the place in randomised high-G combat vectors. The drone was far from the most sophisticated piece of equipment available to UNAF, but even it could detect ghost chatter and junk signals proliferating across its sensor suite. Waves of IFF pips soon followed. Taken together, it all added up to bad news.
‘They’re spooked,’ Cox said. ‘Defensive formations.’
‘But why?’ Syoba asked. ‘It’s not–’
