Reclamation (Book One of the Art of War Trilogy), page 20
‘Christ,’ August said as he came to a stop next to the three of them.
Vondur grunted. He could see Vandemarr’s ruined Goliath smoking in the evening breeze, surrounded by a pool of nanogel and other fluids. Combat protocol dictated that they leave all battlefield casualties until the engagement could be safely assumed to be concluded, and it couldn’t. He knew that that fact alone should have made him furious, but he only felt detached and absent, partly because of the combat stress and partly because of the host of stimulants coursing through his bloodstream.
‘Fucking cobs,’ Cox spat.
Vondur ignored him and re-opened the channel to base. ‘Thunderhead, Gatekeeper Actual.’
‘Damn it, Gatekeeper, next time you break comms I’ll have you court-martialled!’ the base controller snapped.
‘My firewall was hacked,’ Vondur said tiredly. ‘Do you understand? The suit is compromised. Malicious intervention. I need to shut down, and you need to run diagnostics. The whole damn base might be compromised!’
‘Don’t be ridiculous, Gatekeeper. My data reads your Goliath has been functioning on triple redundancy all day. You must have–’
‘Send a medevac, Thunderhead,’ Vondur interjected. ‘I’ve got three men down, two technicals and a fatal. I’m combat ineffective and RTB, how copy?’
The base controller sighed angrily. ‘Medevac is already on the way,’ the man snapped. ‘All effective Gatekeeper units redeploy to the borderlands immediately. Read marker.’
Vondur wrinkled his nose. ‘What? Why? Negative, Thunderhead, we need to disarm before that cruiser hits us again!’
‘Negative, Gatekeeper. First battalion is overwhelmed.’
‘Overwhelmed how, that’s two hundred men!’
‘Gatekeeper, learn to follow orders or you will be relieved of command!’ the controller shouted. ‘Every kaygryn from Vos’Shan is attempting to cross into Anternis.’
Vondur growled his annoyance. ‘Understood, Thunderhead. Gatekeeper out.’
He cancelled the feed and opened a private channel to Jarvin. ‘Lieutenant, take Cox and August to the border. Crowd control. You have command.’
‘Yes, sir,’ Jarvin replied. A few moments later, the three of them powered into the air in a blaze of plasma and powered north to the border.
Vondur stood for a moment, looking around him. He noticed absently that a trio of Valstar loaders were incoming to transport the remains of the three Goliaths back to the base. A swarm of bright orange incident-control drones were in hot pursuit, ready to contain the area and recover any unspent ordnance and sensitive military hardware from the engagement zone. Casualty recovery bots would also screen for survivors among the wreckage and rubble, though now the hospital was gone, they would have to set up triage and treatment centres in its place. It was going to be a huge operation, one which would require the entirety of the Anternis Metropolitan Police force to co-ordinate and a good portion of the UNAF base staff. God only knew how many of them had already been killed in the bombardment.
‘Shit,’ he muttered to himself. It was half past seven in the evening and already the light was fading. With his plasma cores gone, he had no choice but to limp back to base through the deserted accessways.
The orbital bombardment alarms were still droning cyclically as his Goliath trudged home through the empty streets.
SALTED WOUNDS
‘Communicating with the provar is like communicating with a brick wall: an arrogant, zealous, disdainful brick wall.’
Xeno Minister Brin Vyban, after the accidental killing of three UN servicemen by the provar on New Carthage
He had found somewhere to sleep in the labyrinthine basement of UNSOC, a small office fortuitously appointed with a large chaise longue. The combination of the office’s ancient heating system and plush green carpeting gave rise to perfect sleeping conditions, a snug chrysalis deep in the warren of old, empty corridors, cosy and silent. An antique clock on the wall had lulled him to sleep like a metronome at some point late the previous night, and it was to this steady ticking – and the slow pulsing of his IHD – that he awoke.
‘Bugger,’ he breathed. It was just after three o’clock in the morning. He couldn’t have been asleep for more than a few hours, though it had been a deep and unaided sleep. He sighed and rubbed his face with his hands, then sat up, bleary-eyed in the dark, the leather creaking beneath him. So many sleepless nights, he thought wearily, somewhere in the back of his mind while his brain warmed up to full consciousness.
He picked up his jacket-cum-pillow and donned it, the metal of the buttons and medals cold against his hands. ‘Lights,’ he mumbled, and the lights obliged him, casting the office in yellowy relief.
He had one pending message, received the second before his IHD had roused him. His employment contract specified that his IHD messages had to be set to ‘rouse’ at all times, and not for the first time, he found himself lamenting the terms of his employment contract.
Quick-reaction force destroyed 02:31 zulu. All hands lost. Goliaths engaged, confirmed casualties. Report to ops room immediately. SCARLET SCARLET SCARLET.
‘Mother of God,’ he whispered, and yanked the door open. Already he could hear rapid footsteps banging through the ceiling as, evidently, more had received the message. He ran down the long, empty corridor, shouldered the door open at the end and leapt up the steps to the ground floor three at a time.
He saw Scarcroft in the main hall, his normally infallible facial composure a mask of rage. He was carrying his jacket crumpled up in his left hand, his collar open at the throat, with a fine layer of stubble coating his cheeks and chin. Striding angrily, he slowed only to allow Garrick to fall into step beside him.
‘How the fuck did this happen,’ he hissed, flecks of spittle ejecting from his lips. ‘Jesus Christ, this can’t be happening.’
‘How many dead?’ Garrick asked, slightly breathless.
Scarcroft scowled. ‘At least forty,’ he said, staring straight ahead. ‘We’ve only just got the word through from the Fleet Comms Array. Happened not half an hour ago.’
They were up the stairs now and striding down a long, richly decorated corridor.
‘Does Pike know?’
‘Everybody knows,’ Scarcroft snapped, then winced slightly, regretting his tone. ‘Bloody media will have this across the galaxy in two hours. They’ve hit Anternis as well, multiple strikes. Civilian casualties in the hundreds and rising. Half our bloody amrocovs have been wiped out.’ Scarcroft threw his arms up in the air. ‘To make matters worse, initial reports suggest that they fired first!’
Garrick closed his eyes in disbelief, pinching the bridge of his nose. ‘Oh... shit,’ he managed after a while. ‘They were given orders not to fire!’
They reached the corridor where the ops room was. Garrick could already hear Aurelius shouting. The Mantix-clad guards bade them straight in.
‘Good luck,’ one of them mumbled in a sing-song voice. Garrick glowered at him and pushed into the room.
‘... at war! At fucking war, is that what you’re telling me? Two months left of this presidency, two fucking months, and my parting gift to the UN is galactic war! Is that what you’re telling me? Because it sounds like that’s what you’re telling me!’
Garrick and Scarcroft slipped into the room and silently made their way to the rear of the crowd of Joint Chiefs. Aurelius’s face was pure scarlet – much like the Code that had just been issued. His unbridled apoplexy made Scarcroft’s anger look like mild petulance.
‘Sir– ’ Pike began.
‘Shut up! Shut up! This is a disaster! I said nobody was to engage! I was explicit! No shots should have been fired by anybody! I’ve got dead soldiers and dead civilians and dead provar, and now, for a reason completely alien to me, ten thousand fucking kaygryn swarming over the border! What the hell are we supposed to do with them? Don’t they understand the concept of borders? Am I the only one who sees this?’
Garrick noticed out the corner of his eye a few more people sidle in. It was Josette and Karl Howarth, plus a couple of people who, at a guess, he would have placed at Xeno Affairs.
‘A hospital too! A fucking hospital!’ Aurelius continued. Sweat dribbled from his forehead. ‘Along with half the city to boot! Am I to have another Carthage, as well as a war that nobody wants?’
‘Our missives were explicit–’ Pike tried again, as red as Aurelius, though undoubtedly from embarrassment rather than rage.
‘Oh, well, great fucking job, eh?’ Aurelius said, his face a rictus of sarcasm. ‘Great fucking job. Really! That message got through loud and clear, didn’t it? No confusion there! Jesus wept.’
He seemed to stop and calm himself for a few seconds – but then he reanimated, like a corpse coming back to life on the power of anger alone. Had he not been physiologically enhanced, Garrick was certain he would have had a heart attack by now.
‘Is Folhourtian Provari really that difficult to translate? Is it really? I mean, some humans can speak it, can’t they? Could not at least one human fucking being who speaks Provari have checked the missives before they went out?’
Pike cleared his throat. ‘Sir, the cruiser in orbit was running intense LRIS. It’s not inconceivable that it fried its own incoming orders to stand down.’
‘It’s not inconceivable that those provar pricks fucking ignored them either, is it?’ Aurelius suddenly blurted. If it was possible, the silence of the room seemed to deepen. The mere suggestion of a deliberate act of war by the provar was deeply unsettling.
‘Anyway, General,’ the President said with an almighty sigh, taking stock for a few moments. ‘You’re not even responsible for the Fleet, are you? Fleet Marshal, where are you? Somewhere at the back?’
Scarcroft glided forward through the parting crowd of the General Staff, cutting a tall, grim figure – even grimmer in his slightly dishevelled state.
‘Sir,’ he said, his deep voice clipped and restrained.
‘Your orders to the quick-reaction force. What were they?’
Scarcroft’s expression went blank for a moment as he transmitted the encrypted missive to the President via his IHD. The President mumbled slightly as he read it, and then, to the palpable relief of the men around Garrick, nodded.
‘All right.’ He sighed again and rubbed his face in his hands. ‘All right,’ he repeated and took his seat at the head of the table. He reclined, clasping his hands behind his head, staring at the ceiling. ‘We are not at war. Nobody has declared war.’ He soothed himself, repeating this mantra over and over again, then turned to the standing group of officers.
‘John, Varren, Gordon, Alistair… uh, Xander, Karl and Josette, stay. You too, Janek,’ he said to his chief communications officer, as an afterthought. ‘Where’s Andrea?’
‘Gonvarion, sir,’ someone reminded him.
‘Oh, of course. Everyone else, leave us for the time being, please.’ He waited while the half-dozen generals, marshals and Federal Socialists filed out the room. Once the door had closed, he gestured to the table. ‘Everybody sit.’
There was a clattering of chairs. Garrick was sitting at the opposite end of the table to the President. Howarth, McKone and Josette were distributed unevenly on his left, Scarcroft, Pike and Frost to his right.
‘Sorry,’ Aurelius said quietly, rubbing the back of his neck with his hand. ‘That outburst... that was not prudent of me.’ He activated the holo in front of him, and the familiar revolving sphere of Uvolon appeared.
‘My public address, for all the careful crafting that went into it, seems to have gone unheeded. Evidently, I am not to be surprised by this, but honestly, I am. The inherent difficulties in communicating with the provar – and vice versa – do not escape me. I am as well versed in those particular difficulties as anyone else. But I was quite clear. Varren, you were quite clear. So something, somewhere, seems to have been lost quite literally in the translation. Either that or this is a deliberate act.’
He was speaking quietly, in the measured tones of a man on the edge of both rage and despair. It was as agonising to listen to as his apoplectic ranting.
‘Our first priority must be to protect the UN citizenry. It must. This excursion of the provar has already cost hundreds of human lives, and I cannot tolerate it. We have contingencies to bring the UN to a war footing and it is my intention to implement them.’
Garrick sighed inwardly. It was absolutely the wrong thing to do. ‘Sir, if I could just–’
The President held up a hand, silencing him.
‘Thank you, Strike Commander, but if it is your intention to dissuade me from this then I will save you the trouble. If it comforts you, then rest assured I have no intention of going to war with the provar. Indeed, I will do everything in my power to avoid it. But I will not be caught off guard by them either. They have clearly thought nothing of destroying UN ships and cities and killing UN citizens. These are acts of war, and if they intend to continue in this vein then I will not stand idly by while they do so. So while I understand you seek to counsel me otherwise on this matter, Mr Garrick, it is my intention to bring the UN to strength, and if you will not help me achieve that, I will find someone who will. Is that understood?’
Garrick searched the table for an ally, but did not find one – though McKone wore a melancholy look. ‘Very well, sir. I would just like the record to show that I believe this is a mistake.’
‘Duly noted,’ the President replied. There was no anger in his tone. ‘Does anyone else have anything for the record before I go on?’
Silence claimed the room. Garrick had to stop himself from rolling his eyes at the spinelessness of his colleagues. He knew that Pike and Scarcroft, at the very least, knew it was a bad idea.
‘Fleet Marshal,’ Aurelius continued. ‘We have killed at least four provar that I can see from the report. I consider it likely that, given their nature, the provar are going to seek reprisals. So, the Buhrman Protocol. What is the time frame for its implementation?’
Garrick was close to shaking his head. The Buhrman Protocol involved the mobilisation of the entire UN Fleet, calling up all Fleet Auxiliary reservists, implementing orbital bombardment contingencies across almost all UN worlds, and a restriction on the sale of arms to other Tier-Three species. Even things as trivial as hypersled fixtures between the UN and the provar would be cancelled.
Scarcroft cleared his throat. ‘Forty-eight hours, galaxy-wide, sir. Veigis-Class worlds are drilled to less, one Terran-standard day. The Outer Ring will take longer.’
‘When was the last time we practised the Protocol? Do we even practise it?’
‘Exercises run biannually, sir. The last one was in Vespasian – no, June of this year.’
There was a silence as the President contemplated, his eyes flashing occasionally as he consulted his IHD. After a short while, he nodded to himself.
‘Varren.’
‘Yes, sir,’ Scarcroft replied.
‘I am authorising the Buhrman Protocol. Bring Fleet Command at Halo Arch up to speed.’
‘Yes, sir.’
The President seemed to hesitate for a moment. ‘Is there a... subtle way of doing it?’
Scarcroft’s brow creased. ‘Doing what, sir?’
‘Implementing the Protocol.’
‘I’m afraid not, sir. It was not designed to be a subtle measure.’
The President nodded, resigned.
‘The order can be rescinded within thirty minutes, sir,’ Scarcroft said softly. ‘After that, it will be too late.’
‘No,’ Aurelius replied. ‘No, I have made up my mind.’
‘Very good, sir.’
Scarcroft bowed again and exited the room quietly. The President clasped his hands together. ‘Frost,’ he said, turning to the director of UNIS.
‘Sir,’ Frost replied.
‘Liaise with Home Division, would you? I want a report on pro-Ascendancy elements within the UN, and any seditious activities. We can’t have violent demonstrations disrupting mobilisation.’
‘Yes, sir,’ Frost said. ‘By your leave, sir, my men have already prepared a dossier. Preliminary reports suggest that the threat from terrorism has been steadily climbing since the news on the crisis broke. Far-right-wing groups – the United Human Church, Olympus, The Brotherhood of Azariel – have begun protesting outside provari embassies on most Veigis-Class worlds. There have been no reported deaths yet, but plenty of injuries. We expect the violence to increase exponentially as a result of the deaths of UN servicemen.’
‘Shit,’ Aurelius breathed, rubbing his face. ‘Shit. This is the last thing I need.’
‘Metropolitan police in most jurisdictions can handle anything up to a planetary riot,’ Janek said in a placatory tone. ‘This was to be expected. The key now is not to give in to populist demands. The people are going to want blood; we cannot give it to them.’
So, the President’s chief communications officer was slick. A former attorney, Garrick’s IHD informed him. Young, too, at thirty-three.
‘I’ve half a mind to nuke Folhourt and be bloody done with it,’ Aurelius growled.
There was a silence. Hitting the provari homeworld – sacred, hallowed ground that UN ambassadors rarely got to glimpse, let alone step onto – was on Garrick’s list of contingencies as the most insane. Irradiating the planet was one option. Vanilla nuking was another. Better still to capture the Zecad, the Ascendancy’s most holy relic, and hold it to ransom.
‘What are they saying about me?’ Aurelius said quietly.
‘Alexander White is taking an aggressive stance,’ Janek said, ‘predictably. The shadow Xeno Minister, Harris, is bending the ear of the right-wing media.’ He gestured to Frost. ‘As this man has said, sir, it’s a frenzy out there. Once news of the destruction of the so-called “quick-reaction force” reaches the general population, it will only get worse.’
‘Alexander White is a prick,’ Aurelius sneered to a brief ripple of laughter. White was the main contender for the UN presidency, usually a moderate, but, as with all politicians, a populist when not in power. His party, the Human Democrats, were strong in the Outer Ring but less so on Veigis-Class worlds where the more authoritarian Federal Socialists held sway.
