Reclamation (Book One of the Art of War Trilogy), page 25
No, she knew of no one privy to that level of military encryption. Karris could pull it off, certainly, though it would have been far easier for him to simply use UNIS encryption, or any number of personal code words accrued between them over a lengthy professional history.
She sighed and let her hands flop onto the bed either side of her.
‘Think,’ she whispered to herself. ‘Think. Why am I here? How did I get here?’
She summoned Doctor Lee’s personality construct through her IHD.
‘Yes, Miss Staerck,’ Doctor Lee said, the construct appearing at the foot of her bed in a whirlwind of pixels.
‘How did I get here?’ she asked.
‘You were brought here aboard a UNAF Medical Corps shuttle,’ the construct replied in a neutral voice.
‘How did I get into the shuttle?’
‘I’m afraid I am not acquainted with the circumstances of your recovery, Miss Staerck. Few are.’
She wrinkled her nose. ‘Thanks. You can go.’
‘Of course,’ the construct said and winked out of existence.
She looked out of the window, across the topaz ocean, listening to the white noise of the surf lapping against the shore. Irrespective of any deliberate enhancement, the VR sync had a tendency to passively alter one’s time perception during lengthy usages, so she found it very difficult to gauge exactly how much time had come to pass since the beginning of her virtual presence. On an intrinsic, mammalian level, it certainly didn’t feel like eleven hours since she had last been conscious, though her IHD happily confirmed the fact. In which case, she decided, she had wasted a tremendous amount of time languishing in insentience.
‘Right,’ she breathed and opened her IHD’s visible net interface. Like many intelligence agents, she often relied on the good old-fashioned news to gather a primer on galactic events, and an astonishing level of coverage greeted even the most constricted search terms regarding Uvolon. One of the first things she discovered was that Commander Vance had in fact left the planet to meet with Governor Lefebvre, swiftly eradicating him as the provenance of the encrypted message.
She read on, sifting through dozens of articles and holos, both from formal and informal sources. Her eyes widened as she caught the coverage of the destruction of the UN Fleet destroyers dispatched to Uvolon, and her mouth involuntarily shifted from closed to agape as the savage, stroboscopic follow-up on the Goliaths in Anternis City played across her vision. Photos and details of each serviceman killed came next, blurbs of information about their lives and loves which had sent civilian populations in the Outer Ring into a frenzy, itself engendering extensive media attention.
The non-combatant death toll was appallingly high, particularly given it was what the UN widely considered to be peacetime. Thousands had perished in the indiscriminate storm of provari rail strikes, and the centre of the city was nothing more than a pile of pulverised stone and melted girders, illuminated by high-intensity spotlights as emergency crews worked through the night. Among the notable demolitions was Anternis General Hospital, which had been replaced by UNAF-marked prefab triage centres, two huge hospital landers and a steady stream of emergency vehicles ferrying the wounded from downed evacuation craft. Another holo showed UNAF men clad in bright orange hazard Mantix pulling mangled provar corpses out of their wrecked war machines.
She read on, absorbing the information, storing it, compartmentalising. The latest developments focussed on the thousands of kaygryn civilians and militiamen who had, bewilderingly, flooded across the Tiberean borderlands and into Anternis, much to the displeasure of the utterly overwhelmed local UNAF forces who were now engaged in housing them in temporary accommodation. At some point the local government must have anticipated this course of events, to Lyra’s mind, as the encampments were being thrown up with extraordinary efficiency. Holos and footage of this aspect of the operation, however, were relatively scarce, since it was military-run and prosecution awaited any soldier who uploaded images of a live operation to the public net. That in itself, of course, did nothing to stem the constant flow of conjecture from hundreds of news anchors.
She moved on to wider events. The President had called for an emergency summit on Gonvarion under Galactic Protocol Nine in response to the crisis. Progress, insofar as there had been any (and to Lyra it seemed there had been none), was glacial. Both the provar and the UN were taking hard lines. The UN had mobilised the Fleet with all the trappings of the Buhrman Protocol, stymieing what could otherwise have been productive talks. Pressbots and reporters in the Memorial Tower on Gonvarion told of a tense, almost violent, atmosphere in the Grand Chamber, with the UN and Ascendancy legations having been at each other’s throats all morning. The summit was barely a day old and already in diplomatic stalemate, exacerbated by both the absence of the kaygryn diplomatic skarls, who apparently were barricaded in their quarters for fear of the Ascendancy executors, and the presence of a Xhevegan observer, Faunix Siun.
She paused her reading. The Xhevegan Enclaves – hated apostates. Their presence on Gonvarion would certainly aggravate tensions between the UN and the Ascendancy; McKone and the UNDC would have known that. She knew the UN and its machinations well enough to know that the presence of this ‘Siun’ had been motivated by reasons quite apart from altruistic attempts at reconciliation. To be so openly engaged with the Xhevegan, to allow him to sit with the UN legation, it went well beyond recognition of legitimacy – it was practically an endorsement, and a foolhardy one at that.
Her IHD provided her with a list of articles and commentary on the presence of the Xhevegan at the summit, and she stored those written by the more reputable journalists. There were as many again on the absence of the kaygryn, which she also put to one side. The destruction of the kaygryn corvette and the massacre of the kaygryn militia seemed to have been entirely forgotten. She had to do quite a bit of digging to find out what had triggered both attacks in the first place. According to a number of reports, the kaygryn had attacked one of the Ascendancy Crusade Fleets in the Vadian Spiral, though reasons as to why were speculative and conflicting – and in any event seemed to have become worryingly irrelevant.
She read on, for much of the next hour. The UNS Achilles had been in orbit over Uvolon for the last four hours and had initiated the evacuation of Anternis. Both the UN and the Ascendancy had pledged to send more ships to oversee the evacuation, and consensus across the net was that if something was not done soon to ease tensions between the two empires, there would be further conflict. The unanimous view was that the charity dinner at the Summer Palace that evening was unlikely to help anything.
She took a break. It was unnerving not to feel hungry or thirsty. To the contrary, she felt constantly well fed, her thirst persistently slaked. Instead, she went for a walk around the mansion and gardens, to stretch legs that did not need stretching and to take fresh air into lungs that did not exist. On her return inside, she did not go back into the bedroom, but instead made for one of the offices branching off from a ground floor corridor, an ostentatiously decorated room with lavish fittings and a large antique desk. She sat down.
‘Doctor Lee,’ she said to the thin air. Doctor Lee’s personality construct materialised.
‘Yes, Miss Staerck?’
‘The UNAF medical facility in which I am being kept; who else is here?’
‘Doctor Lee, Miss Staerck,’ the construct said, smiling. ‘Will that be everything?’
Lyra shook her head. ‘No, I mean patients.’
‘Ah. As I’m sure you understand, Miss Staerck, I cannot give you any details due to patient confidentiality.’
‘Just give me a number, then,’ she said, smiling. ‘I can’t be the only one here, given the attack on Anternis.’
The construct’s smile twitched for a split second. ‘I believe you are the only patient present on the roster, Miss Staerck. I would have to check, of course.’
Lyra nodded, her composure steady. It was a ludicrous suggestion; the personality construct was an extension of the medical bay’s internal VI. It was the roster. ‘If you would.’
The construct’s expression went blank for a full three seconds – an ice age by modern processing standards. ‘Yes, you are the only one here / there are thirty patients present.’
Lyra squinted at the construct. ‘Once more?’ she said.
‘There are thirty other patients present. The medical facility is running at full capacity. Will that be everything?’
‘Yes,’ Lyra replied briskly, and the construct winked off, and then, ‘Shit.’
Her mind raced. Such a clumsy rewrite could only have been achieved by a rattled human – VIs didn’t make basic mistakes like counting. Someone, most likely Doctor Lee, if he actually existed, was clearly monitoring her conversations with the personality construct in real time, which in turn rendered the deployment of the construct itself totally superfluous. On the assumption that no one competent and with malicious intentions did anything without a good reason, her suspicions reached a new peak and plateaued there.
She paused, realising then that she was very afraid. The fact of her helplessness was hard to overstate. She was alone, with absolutely no perception of her immediate surroundings outside the sync and with the entirety of her fate governed by the will of a single, malignant man. She recalled the message for what felt like the thousandth time, trying to exercise some pragmatism before her fear overwhelmed her. You may be in danger. I will contact you when I can. She was alive, but incapacitated, that much was certain. It would have been very easy for someone to kill her at this moment in time, and there was evidently something preventing that. There were only two possible conclusions she could reach: that there was some third party aware of her condition, and who themselves could not easily be dealt with by Doctor Lee; or that she had something, or knew something, which could not be accessed or hacked via her IHD without her conscious authority.
She decided that the most obvious piece of information which she had come into receipt of was the anonymous text message. Someone invasively scanning her IHD and brain activity would be aware that she was accessing something highly encrypted; her unconsciousness could logically have been part of an external attempt to hack it. The hacker would have been able to deduce from her IHD records the time at which the message was implanted, but nothing beyond that, and so they required her to give up that information freely, either that or via a very sophisticated method of torture – something that would not trip her IHD’s torture-resistance suite and UNIS conditioning. All the other information she had access to, the recovered data from the Tiberean Mission Station which had been uploaded to her Mantix memory banks, was capable of being hacked by a skilled operator really quite easily. Someone like Karris could do it in literally seconds.
She attempted to contact Karris via IHD text-only, but the package was rebuffed by the base’s firewall. She tried again, this time using no encryption but with the same outcome. UNAF was evidently operating a very strict electronic blockade in light of the Ascendancy’s presence over Uvolon, so it was not entirely surprising that she couldn’t reach him. Still, he might have been able to help her – protect her, even.
She thought about who else she could alert to her situation. Overtly calling for help might trigger her premature murder, though saying nothing might guarantee it. There was also the question of range. Inter-IHD messages would be limited to Anternis, since they were dependent on satellites for transmission. Theoretically she could beam one into space, although it would probably never be heard – the modern equivalent of the message in a bottle.
She gritted her teeth, gripping the edge of the wooden desk. No. She would send no messages for now. Whoever had sent her the anonymous message had said they would contact her. So she would wait.
She shook her head, trying to set her rampaging train of thought in order. She opened up the Mantix helmet’s memory bank, and her IHD interface presented her with a myriad of options. There was an exorbitant amount of information, almost as much as the banks of the mission station itself. She started with her own report from two days before, a situation report which contained a useful summary of the intelligence position. Then she reacquainted herself with the last minutes of the mission station before its destruction. They had been watching six kaygryn of interest, and she brought up photos of all of them: Iyadi, Ventu, Havé, Lok, Oné and Bega. All were skarls, either in the Vos’Shan’i militia or regular armed forces. All save Iyadi had been aboard the corvette when it had taken off from its hiding place, and therefore all save Iyadi had perished in the crash.
So where was Iyadi?
The arrival of the provar cruiser had destroyed their satellite coverage of Uvolon – right down to their microsats – and they had also scrapped their drone coverage of Vos’Shan after it had given them corrupted readings on the deadzoned hab, an assumed hack which had cost them a lot of data. Assuming, then, there had been no one surveilling Vos’Shan in the intervening period, there was a two-day black hole in their coverage.
She reviewed the situation in orbit. Aside from Aryn Vance, whose safe passage offworld had been explicitly and painstakingly negotiated with the Impraxes, no one had left Uvolon for the last two days; indeed, the only objects which had travelled into orbit, as far as she could decipher from the information available to her, were a number of surface-to-orbit missiles. That meant Iyadi had to be on Uvolon, probably in Vos’Shan or, if she were to guess, skulking anonymously among the refugees in Anternis.
She went back further through the Mantix memory banks. ‘Ah,’ she said softly, opening up a file containing three orbital photographs of the Tiberean borderlands. In the mission station she had assigned a subroutine to try and translate the Argish annotations on one of them, and it seemed that in the short time between her coming across the photos and the destruction of the station, the program had made some progress in that endeavour. ‘Valleron re-emplaced to centre’ was what the translation had to offer. She frowned. She knew that Argish was almost as difficult as Folhourtian Provari to translate, but that wasn’t far from complete nonsense. She made a note of the translation anyway before closing the file. The rest of the Argish on the picture was basic data, and most of it she had seen so many times on official kaygryn dossiers and satellite feeds that she did not need to translate it.
Next, she opened her Mind Map, a UNIS software suite built for sorting and storing vast amounts of intelligence in a coherent way. Her visible net interface faded to a dark blue, and the familiar spider web pattern came to the fore, each branch and tendril ending in a database or a file location. In the centre of the Map, she put the fact of her own death.
She returned to the main view and created a new branch, then placed an empty file at its terminus marked with a stylised ‘?’. In the file, she wrote, ‘Period between technical death and regaining consciousness, course of events currently unknown’.
She spent much of the next hour creating new branches and files, categorising them logically and supplementing them where she could with media from the public archives and recovered data from the mission station memory banks – a surprising amount of which had been corrupted in the transfer to her suit. She lumped all the intelligence into three main headings: ‘Iyadi’, under which fell the six kaygryn of interest, the recovered Vos’Shan intelligence, the destruction of the corvette and deaths of the militia; ‘Uvolon crisis’, under which came the destruction of the UN Fleet, Goliaths, the centre of Anternis, the current humanitarian crisis and evacuation; and finally, ‘Summit on Gonvarion’, under which came the absence of the kaygryn, the presence of the Xhevegans, the Buhrman Protocol and all other diplomatic matters.
Naturally there were crossovers, and therein lay the beauty of the software. The Mind Map automatically drew what it perceived to be connections – coincidental timings, identical or similar phrases or buzzwords which cropped up in disparate places, locations repeatedly visited by different persons of interest – based on central and local intelligence banks and publicly available information. Already it had brought to her attention the destruction of central Anternis and the three annotated satellite images of the same recovered from the kaygryn military net. She almost dismissed it as meaningless, but then stopped.
‘I wonder…’ she said and pulled back out of the core files. She opened the satellite photo with its highlight of Anternis General Hospital and then the Argish translation which the mission station had come up with. ‘Valleron re-emplaced to centre,’ she said, reading it out loud. Valleron. Untranslatable as far as the mission station had been concerned.
She ran a search for it through the UNIS intelligence archives. The search was so comprehensive it actually postponed much of the non-vital functions of her IHD for an entire two seconds before it turned back nothing. Not one single hit.
She tried again, this time running it through the UN public net. She winced; running a search on the largest library of information in the colonised galaxy often returned a ludicrous amount of information, even on the most specific of topics. An eye-watering six seconds later, the results came in.
‘Valleron is the latest in cyborg and android hardware maintenance and servicing suites. Developed by Kansubashi scientists–’ she cancelled the feed. She had to laugh. ‘Valleron’ had turned up many millions of bits of information, mostly about the brand of robot cleaner. She dismissed the search and cancelled the Mind Map, then reclined into the wing-backed armchair, resting. Although building up an intelligence dossier took her mind off her current situation, it was a draining task. She made a note to follow up the Valleron lead and closed her eyes to rest.
