Reclamation (Book One of the Art of War Trilogy), page 26
She was awoken by a priority message icon pulsing in her vision. She opened her eyes and looked around her. The VR program was still running on daylight, though the sun was certainly lower in the sky. The time on her IHD told her that she’d been asleep for two hours.
She studied the incoming transmission icon. It was a pending live feed, voice-only, and like the text file she had received, highly encrypted. In fact, a quick comparison by some embedded UNIS cryptanalyst software revealed the same encryption signature. Her heart leapt. It was the same person who had sent her the first message. She allowed the feed, though not before running it through her own security scrubbers to add another layer of anonymity to the exchange.
‘Hello,’ she said, cautiously and needlessly quietly.
‘Hello,’ answered a man’s voice, one she did not recognise. He too was talking quietly, and his voice carried with it a faint air of nervousness. ‘Are you all right?’
‘Who are you?’ she asked immediately, her voice louder and level, ‘And why do you think I am in danger?’ Somewhere in the back of her mind, she had been expecting to hear Karris’s voice.
‘I’ll explain everything soon,’ the man said. It seemed, from the way he spoke, that he was not well versed in this sort of situation. ‘I’m a serving member of UNAF. I don’t want to say too much over this channel.’
‘Alistair Frost himself couldn’t crack this encryption,’ Lyra said, snorting. ‘You have access to some pretty decent gear.’
‘Forget that,’ the man said quickly, apparently wary of losing control of the conversation. ‘Listen, there’s something going on here on Anternis. Are you a member of UNIS?’
Lyra paused. She didn’t like that. ‘Do you think I’m a member of UNIS?’
The man sighed, loudly and deliberately. ‘I’m not sure we have time for this.’
‘Why? What’s happening?’
‘Some of my men are supposed to be in the medical facility, tech-deaths. I can’t reach any of them. They appear on the patient roster, but their IHDs are making all the wrong noises. I think it’s something to do with you. You’re the only one in there, in a catastrophic injuries ward built for thirty.’
‘How do you know where I am?’ Lyra asked, running a host of discriminatory programs on the message he had sent. They turned up nothing. Of course, they were never going to, given the encryption, but sometimes the manner in which her codebreaking suites failed was intelligence in itself. ‘You tell me who you are,’ she continued. ‘Not like I can do anything with the information anyway.’
Another sigh. ‘Captain Ben Vondur. I’m a Goliath pilot. I was the one who found your head in the borderlands. Or rather, my ZEN did.’
A shot of adrenaline set Lyra’s heart to pounding. She stood up and began pacing the room, her footfalls cushioned by the ornate rug beneath her. ‘You recovered me? When? How?’
‘Well, that’s just it,’ Vondur said, his voice sharper, more engaged. ‘I found your head on the slopes and we called it in Cat One, but base told us to leave you. They said they were going to take care of it themselves.’
A nauseating flush permeated Lyra’s gut, settling in her throat. ‘Go on,’ she said, holding back tears. Any emotional distress would show up on the brain monitors in the medical facility. She didn’t want to draw more attention to herself.
‘I don’t know who the base controller was. I didn’t recognise the voice,’ Vondur continued, ‘but whoever they were, they were acting on orders. That’s why I asked you if you were UNIS, since UNIS has locked down the entire base and all comms. After the provar pitched up, Solar Ops took over.’
Lyra was pacing quickly now, her mind a whirlwind of thoughts. There was too much to think about. ‘So they tried to stop you from retrieving my head?’
‘Yes. Vigorously. We didn’t know it was your head until my ZEN picked it up. It just read as a refraction-shielded biological mass.’
‘But they did know it was my head?’
‘I don’t know. Whatever they thought it was, they did not want me to pick it up.’
Lyra sat down, then immediately stood back up again and resumed pacing. ‘You sent me that message.’
‘Yes,’ Vondur said, his voice growing impatient again. ‘I thought it was too strange that UNAF wouldn’t want to evacuate a UN casualty – under any circumstances. I wanted to put you on guard, but I’ve been on deployment since we found you and this is the first time my comms haven’t been monitored. Damn Goliath firewall got hacked too, so now I’m wondering whether all of it is linked or whether I’m going insane.’ He paused, muttering about something which Lyra couldn’t hear. ‘Are you all right anyway? What’s your name?’
‘Lyra Staerck, and I don’t know,’ she replied. This time she could not stop the tears. Rescue seemed so close and yet so perilously far away, and even then, she was still just a damned head. ‘I don’t know what’s going on. I don’t trust my doctor. I think they’re trying to hack into my mind.’
‘Who’s your doctor?’ Vondur asked sharply.
‘Doctor Lee.’
‘Who?’
‘Doctor Lee. The resident Med Corps doctor,’ Lyra replied.
‘I’ve never heard of him,’ Vondur said, sounding worried. ‘I’m coming to you. There is more I need to tell you, but I still don’t like speaking about it on this channel.’
‘Can you hurry up, please,’ Lyra said. This new information was making her feel very vulnerable. ‘Where are you?’
‘I’m on the base, in the service hangar. I’ll be there in a couple of minutes.’
Lyra’s breath caught in her throat. Out of nowhere, her vision was fading.
‘Help!’ was all she managed before the iron grip of unconsciousness overcame her.
*
‘Shit!’ Vondur shouted, thumping the comms panel in front of him. ‘Shit!’ He burned the feed and wiped it from the console. ‘ZEN!’ He cancelled the holo and leapt out of the chair, running out of the comms shack and onto a suspended gantry.
‘Is everything all right, Captain?’ ZEN asked him, looking up from the Goliath’s mobile service platform.
‘Get to the med bay as quickly as you can,’ Vondur shouted. ‘Secure the trauma ward. Detain everyone in there, understand?’
‘Yes, sir,’ ZEN replied, unquestioning as always. It jumped off the side of the platform and sprinted mechanically out of the open hangar door.
‘I’ll meet you there!’ Vondur shouted after it. He ran down the stairs and across the hangar floor to the empty service bay. His rail pistol was lying in its thigh strap on the table where he had left it, and he snatched it up, yanked it free of the holster, deactivated the safety with his IHD and sprinted out the doors and onto the asphalt outside.
The medical facility was on the other side of the base, which, as a result of the thousands of kaygryn refugees to the north, was now a ghost town. The cold, early morning air stung his face and roared in his ears as his combat-enhanced legs pistoned him across the grounds. He passed the old college and turned down a wide gravel path to his left, past two hardened bunkers and the bombardment shelter, and towards the medical facility. It was a squat building, drab UNAF green in colour, with a large red cross painted above the main entrance.
The door was open, no doubt ZEN’s doing. As he drew closer, he saw that it had actually been kicked clean off its hinges. He brought his pistol up to bear as he entered, and saw, in the ill-lit building, a sign directing him to the traumatic injuries ward.
He turned right and ran down the gleaming, linoleum-lined corridor, barging through a pair of double doors at the end. A short stairwell took him down a floor, and at the base of the stairs was another pair of double doors, this one with a host of warning markers above it. His IHD also chimed a warning, informing him that the ward contained severely damaged and technically dead patients.
He looked through the clear plastic panel set into the door. The ward inside was long, a good thirty metres, and very dark. He activated his corneal night vision and slowly opened the door, gun aimed into the ward. Immediately he saw ZEN at the far end, standing over a large isolation chamber. Crumpled at his feet was the body of a man dressed in a white lab coat. The back of his skull gaped open, and a thermal scan revealed a starburst of cooling blood, brain matter and fluid dribbling down the wall behind him.
‘Jesus Christ,’ Vondur breathed, cancelling his night vision. ‘Lights.’
The ward lights obliged him, flickering on in a sterile blaze of harsh white. The hot yellow thermal stain was replaced with a dark red wet one.
‘ZEN, I said detain,’ Vondur growled, striding towards the combat VI. ‘Not kill.’
‘I am aware of that, Captain,’ ZEN replied in its dispassionate voice. It was like listening to liquid data. ‘The doctor’s wounds are self-inflicted. I tried to prevent it, but…’ it did a very human shrug. ‘Absence of proximity.’
Vondur reached the foot of the isolation tank. It was only then that he saw a pistol in the doctor’s left hand. It was an old-fashioned one, chemical propellant, with a round that was actually made of jacketed lead. He whistled. It had some stopping power, he gave it that much.
‘Did he say anything before he shot himself?’
‘Stay away from me! No! I don’t give a shit about the kaygryn, I swear, they made me do it!’ shouted the doctor from a speaker mounted on ZEN’s chest. There followed a single gunshot, followed by a strangled gurgling for five seconds. The recording cut out.
‘What does it mean?’ ZEN asked.
‘I have no idea,’ Vondur admitted, ‘but save that recording.’
He came to the edge of the isolation tank, and using the holo panel, he depolarised the glass covering. Inside the sterile containment field was the Mantix helmet housing Lyra’s head, hooked up to a number of wires, nutrient tubes, a direct VR sync interface and an emerald green nanogel medical pack which had been melded to the stump of her neck. At the confluence of the wires was a white box marked with virulent red-and-orange warning symbols. Inside, according to the labels, was an artificial body, mechanical respiratory, digestive and circulatory systems compacted into a space no larger than a shoebox. A bag, connected to an artificial sphincter at the base of the unit, collected waste and piped it away to a biohazard bin at the end of the isolation chamber.
He felt a slight revulsion at the whole setup and turned his attention away to a holo on the inside of the chamber, currently displaying a live optical feed direct from the VR sync. The words NO FEED AVAILABLE: PRIVATE ENCRYPTION were displayed in red in the centre of the screen.
‘What’s going on here?’ he muttered to himself, studying the console in front of him. ‘Get me into this, will you?’ he said to ZEN, who obliged him, easily overcoming the doctor’s primitive firewall. As soon as he gained access, a host of holos sprang into life; file after file of information on Lyra’s thoughts and movements inside the sync. He winced as he watched videos of her reliving her death. The final impact with the branch made him physically flinch.
‘Go and find Elyan, Syoba and Vandemarr,’ he said to ZEN, who was watching the feed next to him. ‘They should be around here somewhere. Quickly.’
‘Yes, Captain,’ the VI replied and darted out of the ward with a whir of servos.
Vondur turned back to the feed in front of him. The doctor – and a quick check confirmed his name was Sorper, not Lee – had evidently been building up a corpus of intelligence for someone. His own annotations, appended as text files, appeared on almost every piece of data, some containing frustrated invective where Lyra had accessed encrypted UNIS programs or transmissions which had been blocked from his view. Two of the most prominent black holes he recognised: one was the message he had implanted in her IHD before handing her head over to the Medical Corps shuttle, and the other was the conversation he’d been having with her but five minutes before. Both times Sorper had knocked her unconscious in an attempt to circumvent some of her conscious-control firewalls, but he had been frustrated by the sheer depth of the encryption. According to the doctor’s records, his attempts to break into Vondur’s text-only message had taken eleven hours, during which time he had managed to penetrate only one dummy layer of encryption.
He uploaded all the data the doctor had collated to a secure file on his IHD. He saw, with a sneer of distaste, that there were several Ultraporn programs in the console in which the doctor had uploaded Lyra’s likeness. He purged them from his hard drive.
Using his IHD, he regained access to the isolation chamber’s controls and opened its main command holo. He recalibrated it to the most junior doctor setting and then hit the ‘consciousness: activate’ key. The live optic feed holo next to Lyra’s head flickered back into life, this time displaying the inside of what looked like some kind of antique-choked mansion. She was slumped in front of a desk, with a window behind it looking out over an ocean.
‘Lyra?’ he said, cautiously opening a comms link directly to the Mantix helmet.
‘Who’s that?’ she said, her voice groggy.
‘It’s Vondur,’ he replied. ‘I’m in the base med facility, next to your… head. You should know that I can see everything you can see; there’s a direct optical feed in front of me.’
‘That asshole,’ she said in a weary voice. ‘What’s he doing? Do you have him? What has he said?’
‘Not a lot,’ Vondur replied, looking at the corpse by his feet. ‘He’s dead. He shot himself when my ZEN arrived.’
The holo screen pitched downwards, giving him a full view of her bare breasts under the loose-fitting blouse she wore as she checked her body over. He looked away, clearing his throat. ‘Lyra, I can see everything–’
‘Oh for God’s sake, they’re just tits,’ she snapped. The turnaround in her voice was quite startling. ‘You have a ZEN? A zhahassi ZEN?’
‘Yeah,’ he replied. ‘Useful bit of kit.’
‘I’ll say,’ she replied, looking around the room. She started pacing again, impatient now that she was out of danger. ‘What’s going on up there? Can you describe the situation to me?’
Vondur looked around him. ‘You’re in an isolation booth. You’re hooked up to an artificial body, a med pack and… a bunch of wires and tubes. I don’t know what any of it is for. There’s no one else in here as far as I can tell.’
‘Right,’ Lyra said. She was pacing down a corridor now. She pinched the bridge of her nose with her hand. ‘What’s going on with you? Why are you here?’
‘My squadron is either dead or taking care of the kaygryn refugees to the north. My Goliath got canned, so I’m back on base. Which is also empty, by the way.’
‘Okay,’ Lyra replied. ‘I think you need to get me out of here. Whoever Lee was working for–’
‘Sorper,’ Vondur interrupted. ‘Not Lee, Sorper.’
‘Okay, well, whoever Sorper was working for is probably still on Uvolon, which means they’ll know he’s dead sooner or later. Being a head, that puts me at a significant disadvantage.’ She was talking in such a way as to brook no argument, causing Vondur to briefly wonder what his obligations were when receiving orders from the intelligence services.
‘There’s no getting off Anternis at the moment,’ Vondur replied. ‘The provar have got orbit stitched up.’
‘What about the Achilles?’ she said. ‘I read they’ve already started loading it.’
‘Humans, yes,’ Vondur said. ‘SOC is still debating whether to let kaygryn on board. They’re worried if they do the cruiser will junk it. There’s a lot of pressure on the UN right now.’
On the holo, Lyra stopped walking. ‘Shit,’ she said.
‘What?’ Vondur asked, looking around him. His hand instinctively reached towards his pistol, currently sitting on top of the isolation booth. ‘Listen, I don’t know how much time we have–’
‘Shut up a minute,’ Lyra said. ‘I was posted here to track six kaygryn skarls, right? Months ago. You know that corvette that got shot down?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, that corvette had five of them on it, killed the lot.’
‘Right...’
‘One of them, called Iyadi, a militia skarl, was not on board. This guy,’ she said, sending him a picture. ‘The night before the corvette got shot down, he went into a deadzoned hab in Vos’Shan. The next day the other five had somehow made it aboard that corvette without us knowing.’
‘I really don’t–’
‘Iyadi knows what’s going on here,’ she said impatiently. ‘He is the key. I think there is someone – some people on Anternis helping him. Sorper was probably one. There are others, others with access to high-grade counter-LRIS equipment. They need to get him offworld, and the only way they are going to be able to do that now is aboard the Achilles.’
Vondur said nothing for a few moments, trying to get his head around the implications. ‘These people – let’s assume they exist, as you say. Would they – or anyone – be able to remotely hack a Goliath and activate its weapon systems?’
‘Uh,’ Lyra said, shaking her head. ‘I’m not sure. I don’t know what firewalls a Goliath runs, but I can imagine they aren’t easy to crack.’ She paused, thinking. ‘That said, it’s not impossible if you knew exactly what you were doing and had some very sophisticated equipment. SOC-level stuff, I’m not sure we’d have it on Uvolon, but then I said the same thing about deadzones.’
‘So it’s possible?’
‘I’d say so. I’d say so even more, given the circumstances. When did it happen?’
‘Straight after Jacob Rynn got killed. Burned my firewalls and fired off half my Hydras before I even knew what was going on. Right at that cruiser.’
‘Are you sure it was hacked?’
‘You sound like the goddamned base controller!’ he snapped, then instantly regretted it. ‘Sorry,’ he said, a little sheepishly. It was not like him to lose his temper.
‘No, don’t be,’ Lyra said, her voice distant. ‘If it’s true, there’s a link, I’m sure of it. The corvette, the deadzones, my death… your hack...’
