Reclamation (Book One of the Art of War Trilogy), page 2
He was on the verge of radioing the UN Armed Forces base when the corvette was struck by a javelin of light, as if God himself had thrown a spear straight through the ship and into the ocean below.
A kinetic rail strike.
‘My God!’ he shouted as the shrieking thunderclap of shattered superstructure and tortured atmosphere hit him. He could only watch in mute fascination as the corvette immediately listed into a spin, trailing smoke. It must have taken thirty seconds for it to fall out of the sky, shedding its innards and kaygryn crewmen as it went. It hit the ocean in a huge plume of superheated steam as its vast bulk displaced thousands of tonnes of seawater. The ocean, cold and grey, swelled around the impact and churned into a miniature tsunami, frothing with corpses and debris. It raced towards the shore, threatening to engulf the beach which but a few minutes before had been a picture of tropical relaxation.
Already his IHD was flashing with return-to-base orders. Without a second thought, he leapt into the jeep, selected manual transmission and with an ear-splitting screech of tyres, tore on to the ring road. To his left, the swell from the impact crested the sand dunes that made a crude bank before the road, and choppy grey water, filled with debris, ploughed into the inner barrier. The jeep peaked at a hundred kilometres per hour and continued at that speed for a couple of minutes, before slowing violently and screeching off the ring road and onto an arrow-straight accessway that led all the way to the northern quarter of the city. It would take him five minutes to reach the base, but there were restrictions for land-based vehicles inside the city which would double his travel time.
He sped between two huge plastic hydroponics domes, the city ahead dotted with thousands of lights in the gathering dusk. His mind was still trying to process what he had just witnessed. Little of it made sense. As far as UNIS was concerned, the kaygryn didn’t even have any void-capable naval hardware in Vos’Shan, and the morning update on sector fleet movements had confidently projected orbit to be clear all week. He shook his head in disbelief. A fatal rail strike on UN sovereign territory gave the lie to all of it.
A moment later, the jeep’s dashboard holo blinked into life, and the face of the UNAF base commander, Aryn Vance, filled the screen.
‘Captain,’ he snapped, scowling. ‘What’s your ETA?’
Vondur checked his digital display. ‘Ten minutes, sir,’ he replied, lifting his hand to shield his face from the worst of the rain.
Vance grunted. ‘Good. I need the whole squadron deployed in the next half-hour. See to it, Priority One.’
‘Yes, sir,’ Vondur replied, and then, with not a little concern, ‘what’s the situation?’
‘Developing,’ Vance replied, and the holo terminated.
CODE CYAN
‘Why must we continually wage war? Because we excel at it. Mankind, for whatever reason, is predisposed to the effective prosecution of warfare. If one replaced war with gardening, every planet would be a paradise.’
Attributed to Ambassador Kijoa, shortly before the destruction of Ariandana
He awoke, mouth dry and head swimming with alcohol from a state dinner the night before. A sour, unpleasant wave of nausea washed up from the pit of his stomach, and he swallowed it down, reaching for the glass of water by the side of his bed.
‘Colder,’ he mumbled to the room. The climate control clicked obediently. He took a few gulps of the tepid water and with weak hands checked the time on his terminal. To his surprise, he had a pending call.
‘UNSOC,’ he breathed slowly, bemused, wrinkling his nose as he read the digital shorthand of the sender bar. Next to him, his wife moaned something irritably, and she rolled over, her naked body parting with the duvet.
He sighed, trying to ignore the stirring in his groin as thoughts of the vigorous, inebriated sex of the night before popped into his head like a blearily erotic slideshow. ‘Yes?’ he mumbled, accepting a sound-only transmission.
‘John? It’s Roge from Colonies Admin.’
He sighed, trying to place the name. ‘Roge. What time is it?’
‘Four-thirty. I wouldn’t have troubled you but we have a serious situation. The President is expecting you. Can you can come in?’
John rubbed his eyes and sat up, and felt his wife pull the covers away from him. He took another gulp of water and tried to think of an excuse not to go in, President or no. ‘Yeah, I can come in. Where are you? Halo Arch?’
‘No, Solar Ops Command. We’ve got a shuttle waiting for you at Whiteport. I’ve told your PA where it is. No need to check in.’
John shook his head resignedly. ‘Yep, fine. I’ll see you in an hour.’
‘Thanks, John.’ The signal terminated.
He massaged his temples briefly, then turned and put a hand on his wife’s hip. ‘That was Roge Viersson. They want me to go in.’
‘Who’s Roge Viersson?’ she asked dozily. ‘Have I met him?’
He blew his cheeks out. ‘I think he’s a civil servant in Colonies Admin,’ he replied. ‘You haven’t met him. Hmm, or maybe you have, in Vonreigis.’
She made an uninterested noise. ‘When are you getting back?’
‘Not sure. I’ll give you a call when I know what’s what.’
‘See you later.’
He swung his legs out the side of the bed and had his semiautonomous implant microbots dampen as many of the effects of the hangover as possible. Almost instantly the throbbing ache in his head began to recede, and his nausea disappeared.
He stood up, only a little off-balance, walked over to the wardrobe and changed into a dark, braided and medalled suit with high-stock collars, rolling up the sleeves of the shirt and stuffing a dark blue tie into his trouser pocket. He sprayed his neck with a shot of aftershave and then pressed a tiny button on the side of his skull, just behind the ridge of his right eye socket. A metre-squared translucent calendar and an array of application options appeared in front of him. He mentally selected the day’s date, and a large window displayed the day’s engagements.
He made for the door. ‘See you this evening,’ he said to his wife, but she was already asleep.
One of his aides, Chris Hayeson, was waiting for him outside, holding a black umbrella morosely against the thick sheet of torrential rain. The sky was a deep black, bellied by ragged thunderheads so low that the tops of Arrengate’s monolithic skyscrapers were lost in the gloom.
‘Jesus, this weather,’ he said, pulling the collar of his raincoat up and darting out the entrance of his town house. Chris did his best to shield him from the onslaught as he got into the back of the car. The door slammed, and a few moments later his PA dived in next to him, dripping with rainwater.
‘Has Roge been in touch?’ he exhaled, running a hand through his damp, sandy mop of hair.
‘Yeah. What’s the story?’
Chris shrugged. ‘No idea. He was being very coy about it.’
The driverless car pulled away from the kerb with a melodic hum of its engine and headed down Gosling Street, windscreen wipers on full power. After a minute they pulled smoothly onto the elevated Grymfriars trackway, locked into the central line, and accelerated neatly to a hundred and fifty kilometres an hour.
He sat in silence while Chris made two cups of coffee from the machine in front of them, watching the swollen river Arren race past, writhing with huge, snake-like wave power generators. Municipal hazard lighting cast a soft, amber pallor over much of the roads below, though fifty metres above street level the harsher glow of elevated trackway halogen lamps seared his retinas with dancing patterns of blue and green. Beyond them, tower blocks ribbed with crimson warning lights loomed in the darkness, latticed by suspended walkways and the glow-worm-like carriages of the city monorail.
‘Where are we? At Whiteport, I mean,’ he asked eventually, breaking the rain’s monopoly over the silence. He slurped the hot coffee.
‘Terminal eighteen,’ Chris replied, busy navigating his implant hard drive by the vacant expression on his face. ‘They wanted to stick you in a Bluebird but I got you a…’ He paused. John winced in anticipation. ‘… a V14 instead.’
John’s wince deepened. ‘A V14? I thought those days were long behind me.’
‘It’s much faster,’ Chris added hurriedly.
John conceded that with a nod. ‘That’s true. Though for comfort’s sake, in future I think a Bluebird will do just fine.’
The car continued on, taking a fork in the elevated trackway that led directly to Whiteport, a thirty-kilometre, fifty-terminal complex that handled the vast majority of all the Vargonroth’s interplanetary flight, as well as a healthy slice of the atmospheric. On a clear day, the landing pylons could be seen for hundreds of miles, colossal spikes of carbon nanotubes that needled elevators into the lower atmosphere, guiding the atmosphere-capable ships down, and passengers and cargo up.
The rain showed no signs of letting up, as much as the sun showed no signs of rising. Ahead of them, though, despite the bloated clouds above, the well-lit security cordon of Whiteport loomed like a second halogen sun, absorbing the lights of the elevated trackway, the street-level municipals and the skyscraper hazards.
The car rolled to a controlled stop at checkpoint East-Four, a miniscule corrugation in the slabbed rockcrete and chain-link perimeter fence, capped with curls of electrified razor wire and guarded by hypertrain-tested crash barriers and the keen electromagnetic sting of the Port Authority’s railguns. Either side of them, the guard stations snapped into life, and John felt the familiar feeling of static wash over him as they were invasively scanned. Once cleared, the gates opened to reveal two kilometres of smooth, rain-skinned concrete, and the car made for the government terminals, skirting a wide parabola around the nearest band of orbital pylons.
‘There it is,’ Chris said, nodding ahead of them. John craned to see out the front windscreen and saw, a hundred metres ahead, the blunt black insectoid form of the Manticore sitting on a circular VTOL platform. He noted, with a pang of dismay, that the hold door was open, letting the rain soak the spartan interior.
‘It’s certainly something,’ he said morosely.
The car drew to another smooth stop outside the V14, and the pilot, dressed in a black pressure suit and helmet, yanked open his door.
‘Commander,’ he half-shouted over the combined roar of the foul weather and the turbofans of the Manticore, ‘Squadron Leader James Lang. It’s a pleasure. I understand you’re going to UNSOC on a Priority One?’
‘Have a pleasant flight,’ Chris called from the car. John gave him a thumbs up. ‘How long is it going to take?’ he asked Lang and found himself being steered towards the hold.
‘Fifteen minutes, tops.’
John climbed into the hold and sat down in a space on one of the partitioned benches. He was just as familiar with the hold as any other career officer. Behind him the hold door sealed shut, and his ears popped. Instantly the roar of the torrential rain was drowned out, and the charging turbofan nodes were confined to a low, vibrating whir.
After a few moments, he felt the cockpit slam shut.
‘Can you hear me?’ crackled Lang’s voice over the intercom. It was their only point of communication, save narrowband messaging via their IHDs.
‘Yes,’ John replied, and with a crescendo of turbofans, the Manticore pulled away from the ground.
The trip took less than the estimated fifteen minutes. He accessed the V14’s external feeds for the majority of it, watching as the dense, largely urban topography of Arrengate sped past below, and then for the rest of the short journey, the roiling confluence of the East Sea and Straights of Qatrin. They followed the line of the ES1 hypertrain for the most part, a vast quartet of vacuum-sealed tunnels flanked by the Whiteport Land Bridge and surrounded by the cold grey sea below. When the train lines curved away to the left, however, the Manticore maintained its course, leaving them over open water until they reached the United Nations Solar Operations Command, a squat grey building occupying a small island a hundred kilometres from Arrengate.
They touched down on a small landing platform on the western end of the island, and John climbed out of the hold, his feet finding the wet, rainswept concrete of the platform. Ahead of them, the landing platform stretched away, lit by the harsh glare of the spaceport floodlights. The nearest craft – a sleek, executive jet – was two hundred metres away, being refuelled by a dishevelled crew of men in sodden overalls.
A long black staff car was waiting to take him to the main building, and he climbed into the back of it. As soon as the door slammed shut, the car was moving, accelerating smoothly across the concrete of the spaceport. They exited through the southern gate and took a short road towards the building – much larger and more impressive than when seen from the air. They drove down a boulevard lined with hundreds of flags of the UN’s constituent worlds, dependencies and protectorates, though each one was wrapped slackly around its pole. John tried to identify as many as he could. There had been a time when he was able to name them all, but the UN had contracted vastly even within his five decades of life, haemorrhaging territories in the wake of Hadan’s Reach in a far-reaching consolidation strategy. As a result, half the flags he saw were totally alien to him.
The road was short, and it wasn’t long before the staff car had reached the wide gravel turning circle just outside the pillared façade of the HQ building itself. They swung smoothly around the fountain in the centre of the circle, a bronze depiction of First Contact, now eroded from centuries of Vargonroth’s hard weather systems. The car reached a complete stop parallel to the bottom step, and John waved his hand over the door release holo. Once again at the mercy of the elements, he ran up the stairs and past the pillars, and walked through the door field. Above his head, a security light flashed green, and the guards waved him through.
The entrance hall to UNSOC was large and cold despite its climate control, formed of a chessboard pattern floor and large, multi-pronged staircase that dominated the south wall. The hall itself was mostly empty, though one of its occupants he instantly recognised. The woman, Josette Chevalier, saw him and immediately strode towards him, bringing short a conversation she’d been having over her terminal. She was dressed in a tight and well-decorated blue suit, her medals tinkling with each step. She offered him a half-smile as she drew up before him.
‘John Garrick,’ she said, proffering a hand. He took it, determined not to appear awkward.
‘Josette Chevalier,’ he replied with a charming, confident smile. ‘It’s been a while.’
It had been a while, nearly a year. Josette had been the UN Commissioner for Refugees, but had been seconded to Solar Command as one of UNIS’s attachés six months earlier after excelling, to the surprise of all, at counterterrorism. That had caused quite a stir over in Halo Arch.
‘What’s going on?’ he asked, falling into step beside her. ‘I got a call from Roge an hour ago asking me to come in.’
Josette activated an audio damper brooch on her lapel. ‘We have a developing situation on Uvolon,’ she said, still in a low voice despite the brooch, leading him up the central staircase. ‘Possible Code Scarlet.’
That set his heart racing: Code Scarlet – a UN/xeno conflict. Thanks to a comprehensive scheme of legal, administrative and diplomatic integration that had spanned centuries, such incidents were incredibly rare, though not unheard of. The infrequency of such episodes made them no less frightening to consider; history had taught him that they tended to be very violent.
‘Christ,’ he muttered. They were walking down a corridor in the upper east wing, their footfalls softened by plush royal-blue carpeting. Wood panelling and gilt-framed portraits surrounded them on both sides, and soft lighting emanated from regularly spaced and ornate fixtures.
Josette made a half-shrug, a strange look of distaste written across her face. It irked him how much she’d changed since her short secondment to Solar Command. No longer was she the enthusiastic, personable Commissioner of Refugees. It was like she’d adopted the sullen attitude and cagey mannerisms of what she considered a UNIS agent should have and pretended they were her own.
‘We received a report from the Vadian Mission Station overnight,’ she said. They reached the end of the corridor and made through the door there, into a carpeted stairwell. She led them upwards. ‘Apparently one of the provari crusade fleets was attacked by the kaygryn. The fallout has reached Uvolon.’
‘The kaygryn attacked the provar?’ John asked slowly. There were many things wrong with what she’d said, but that struck him as the most immediately ridiculous. The kaygryn were some bastard, artificially evolved provari slave race, existing under the boot heel of the Ascendancy and routinely subjugated and out-and-out massacred. For the kaygryn to attack them was like soft flesh trying to attack a scalpel.
Josette nodded. ‘The President’s here for a briefing; you may as well hear it all then.’
They continued up the stairs until they reached the top floor. They were scanned by security hardware once more before being permitted access. Another corridor greeted them, and they made straight for the briefing room – one which John was very familiar with. The room represented the nexus of the UN’s military, political and intelligence communities, where the highest echelons of those executive arms of the UN met and made far-reaching decisions – decisions with often violent consequences.
