Reclamation (Book One of the Art of War Trilogy), page 27
‘This kaygryn, Iyadi, he knows what’s going on?’ Vondur asked, leaving the conspiracy theorising to Lyra.
‘I’m certain of it. He must be in Anternis, trying to get aboard the Achilles. You said so yourself: they’re debating whether to let kaygryn refugees offworld. If that’s the case then it must be where Iyadi is heading. We need to find him and follow him. Where is the evacuation zone?’
‘They’ve been shuttling civilians to the salt flats south since yesterday morning,’ Vondur said. ‘But that’s a catastrophe at the moment. Half the transports were destroyed in the rail strikes.’ He knew where this was going.
‘All right,’ Lyra said, walking back to the office she had started in. ‘I’m going to need you to transport me to the evacuation centre. At some point you also need to tell me exactly what’s happened with you and your squadron as well. I know this involves you going AWOL so I’m going to second you under UNIS Executive Order 28.03, understand?’
‘Right…’ Vondur replied, slightly uneasily. ‘I need to find out what happened to my men, first.’
‘They’re in the morgue,’ ZEN said, appearing next to Vondur. ‘All three are fully dead. It seems that Syoba has been poisoned. I detected traces of Haradoxin in his system. Pilot Officers Elyan and Vandemarr have, it appears, succumbed to the wounds dealt to them by the provar.’
Vondur gritted his teeth. Of course Elyan and Vandemarr were dead, but Syoba could have been saved. He became angry at Sorper then for taking his own life. He would have dearly liked to kill the man himself.
‘You son of a bitch!’ he shouted, kicking the corpse. Liquid brains sloshed out of the gaping hole in his head.
‘Captain!’ Lyra said, sharply. ‘I’m sorry but we don’t have time for this. The ship will not take that long to load. You need to get me to the evacuation area now. Have your men search for Iyadi. If they find him, have them put a net-wide tag on him, encrypted for the squadron only, got it?’
‘Yes, I get it,’ Vondur said. His hands were trembling with anger.
‘Focus, Captain,’ Lyra said. ‘This is important. We need to act quickly, but not rashly, all right?’
Vondur sighed, reining in his anger. It was easier to ignore it for present purposes, rather than try and overcome it. ‘Right,’ he said sullenly. ‘How do I get you out of here?’
‘I don’t know, I can’t see what you can see,’ Lyra replied. ‘Is there some way of disconnecting me without killing me?’
Vondur searched the control panel. ‘ZEN, how do I do this?’ he asked, turning to the VI.
‘One moment,’ ZEN replied, interfacing with the isolation chamber’s console.
‘I have studied the schematics,’ it said a few seconds later. ‘The artificial body has a portable plasmastat power core. It is like a Goliath’s, but on a much smaller scale. According to the medical facility’s core VI, there is a plasmastat store across the hallway. One will provide enough power for ten days.’
‘Get three,’ Vondur said. He re-engaged the safety on his rail pistol and slid it back into its holster while ZEN jogged across the ward and out the double doors at the far end. ‘It’s all right, Lyra, ZEN knows how to disconnect you. I’m going to take you back to base and get a holdall, then we’ll make our way to the nearest evacuation centre. Shouldn’t be too difficult with the base as empty as it is. Is there anyone I need to tell about you leaving? A boss or supervisor or someone?’
‘No,’ Lyra said hurriedly. ‘I have already tried to reach him. It’s completely locked down. Besides, the less they know right now the better.’
‘Mm,’ Vondur said, as ZEN returned with three small metal cylinders. He took them into his hands. They were warm to the touch and would have melted his skin in a flash had they not been thoroughly insulated.
‘Do you know how to remove her and keep her alive?’ he asked ZEN.
‘Yes,’ ZEN replied, nodding once. ‘Now that she has the artificial body, much of this is superfluous.’ It gestured to the connecting pipes.
‘We’re going to disconnect you now,’ Vondur said to Lyra. ‘Are you ready?’
‘We’re wasting time, Captain,’ Lyra replied, though it was clear from her vital signs that her impatience was feigned.
‘Do it,’ Vondur said to ZEN.
Unplugging all the cables and wires took two minutes and produced a worrying amount of bloodlike fluids, although ZEN assured him it was nothing to be concerned about. Once the head was free of its crown of plugs, all that remained was the helmet, the nanogel med pack and a single spine-like tube which plugged Lyra’s neck into the artificial body. Vondur kept the voice-only channel open while the chamber’s holos fizzled out, each reading NO INPUT.
‘You okay in there?’ he asked, letting ZEN carry her – a much safer pair of hands. The zhahassi had built them well.
‘I’m fine,’ Lyra replied, her voice once more tinged with a hint of worry. ‘You have the plasmastats?’
‘Right here in my hands,’ Vondur replied. He nodded to ZEN. ‘Back to the hangar, double time. And for God’s sake, be careful.’
*
They made their way back to the hangar with an exaggerated nonchalance that in other circumstances would have bordered on comical. Not for the first time, Vondur found himself thankful that the base was so empty. Even the Valstar loaders which had brought the ruined Goliaths back were sat motionless on the runway, dark and un-crewed. The crisis could spare no hands, not even airmen.
The Goliath hangar was as empty as he’d left it. He had ZEN put Lyra down on the maintenance platform and quickly found what he was looking for: a metre-long, armoured holdall, padded inside with a nanogel matrix that would mould around whatever was placed inside and protect it from all but the most violent of assaults. It was also conveniently code-locked, and he encrypted the access panel so that only he, ZEN or Lyra could open it. Once Lyra was secure, he changed out of his Goliath gear and into a pair of plain combat trousers, boots, a squadron t-shirt and a battered old jacket. He slipped the rail pistol into a chest-mount holster and put a couple of spare magazines into his inside jacket pocket.
He accessed the base’s data net via his IHD to see the current situation regarding the evacuation. The Achilles’s heavy landers had been brought into action and had been shuttling people into orbit for a good few hours now. According to the latest classified reports, there were already ten thousand civilians on board, and that rate of boarding was due to increase as the pilots and crew grew more accustomed to the flying conditions of Uvolon. The third tranche of evacuees was gathering at the hydroponic compound to the south, and Vondur reflected that it was fortunate Anternis was not a large city. Even travelling within the land speed limit, it would only take him ten minutes to reach the evacuation point.
He commandeered a jeep from the motor pool and strapped the holdall into the back seat. ZEN would make it impossible to travel unnoticed, given the inherent difficulties in disguising it, but it was just too useful in a fight. It buckled itself into the passenger seat harness, sitting patiently. Vondur gave him a portable rail carbine, currently compacted into an extendable twenty-centimetre block, and then jogged back into the hangar. He drew up to his Goliath, currently being fussed over by a pair of robotic repair arms, and accessed the external comms hub.
‘Lieutenant,’ he said, opening a secure channel to Jarvin.
‘Sir?’ Jarvin replied. Vondur could see through the lieutenant’s optical feed a never-ending row of tents being erected automatically by a half-tracked, VI-controlled truck. Around him, hundreds of dishevelled kaygryn, filthy and exhausted, milled about while Mantix-clad troops from Anternis’s first battalion handed out bottled water and freeze-dried rations.
‘I need you to listen to me very carefully, Jarvin. I’m on the clock and don’t have a lot of time to explain, understand?’
‘Yes, sir,’ Jarvin replied immediately. Dependable, trustworthy Jarvin. Vondur could have kissed him at that moment.
‘That woman’s head we recovered, she was a UNIS agent. She’s alive, I’m with her now. Someone tried to murder her in the medical facility. ZEN saved her life.’
‘Christ. Good old ZEN,’ Jarvin said.
‘Quite,’ Vondur replied. ‘She’s been stationed here for months, tracking some… important kaygryn, or something. She knows all about the corvette that got wasted. She’s got some theories about what’s going on here, and she thinks my Goliath being hacked is something to do with it. I’m taking her offworld because she’s not safe here, but we can’t afford to lose one of these kaygryn either. His name is Iyadi, and he’s a skarl in the Vos’Shan’i militia. We think he’s going to try and make his way offworld if they authorise the evacuation of kaygryn as well. Or he might just make a crack at smuggling himself on board. What I need you to do is keep an eye out for him. He looks like this.’ He sent Jarvin the picture that Lyra had sent him.
‘Ugly son of a bitch, isn’t he?’
‘Yes he is. If you see him, tag him with a squadron-only IHD marker, right? I’m not going to be in my Goliath so I won’t see it unless it’s IHD. Tell Cox and August. I’m going to have to go now, good luck, all right?’
‘Yes, sir. Same to you.’
Vondur cancelled the feed and climbed out of the cockpit. He jogged back over to the jeep, climbed into the driver’s seat and started the engine.
‘Ready?’ he asked ZEN.
‘Yes, Captain,’ ZEN replied.
Vondur saw in the distance the Achilles’s landers still shuttling back and forth in the deep blue morning light, their plasma engines flaring brightly in the cold air.
‘Right then. Let’s get on with it, shall we?’
PERSONS OF INTEREST
‘The machinations of government are not the concern of the common man. If he is happy, secure and well provided for, free of all charge, then I do not see what right he has to discover the means of his comfort.’
George Louk, Human Democrat and Governor of Theyde, shortly before his suicide
‘Sir, I’m sorry to wake you,’ Garrick said, peering into the darkness of the President’s personal UNSOC office.
‘I’m not asleep, Strike Commander,’ the President said, his voice ringing clear in the darkness. Behind him a large, arched window looked directly out onto the roiling East Sea, allowing the room to be filled with parallelograms of weak grey light. It was 4 p.m. on Vargonroth, and twilight and cloud already dominated the sky, a symptom of the planet’s unforgiving eight-month winter. The President was slumped over his desk, head resting in his folded arms. ‘What’s the problem?’ he asked, without looking up.
‘Another briefing, I’m afraid, sir,’ Garrick said, clearing his throat. He had decided that he would summon the President personally to the briefing room. Since none of them were allowed to leave the building, he was taking any excuse for a good walk.
‘What’s the problem?’ the President repeated.
Garrick looked at the ceiling. ‘The triumvirate has returned. Your intelligence briefing is ready, sir.’
The President snorted. ‘Oh, all right,’ he said. He pressed himself up, and Garrick watched the man’s pupils visibly dilate. ‘I don’t know how I would get by without these stims,’ he muttered as he caught Garrick’s eye, smoothing his thin hair back over his head. He straightened himself out, exhaling loudly, and gestured to the door. ‘Lead us on, Mr Garrick.’
They spent the walk to the briefing room in silence, the President clearly preoccupied with his IHD. Garrick’s own mind was a whirlwind of thoughts. There were a hundred different things he wanted to say to Aurelius, from offering his counsel to simply shouting his objections in the man’s face, but he bit his tongue. He did not think for a moment that the President’s threat to remove him from his staff was an idle one, given his recent conduct, and Garrick was not a particularly principled man. It would be far better to remain at the nerve centre, where his work and opinions would count, than to resign in protest and martyr himself to a sphere of silence. And there was his UNAF pension to consider.
They reached the briefing room in good time. Garrick noticed that the Mantix-clad sentries had been replaced by two different Mantix-clad sentries. They saluted as he and the President entered, once more greeted by the electronic hum of holos and the smell of stale sweat and bad tempers.
The room was filled with the usual suspects, save a new woman who must have come in after he had left to summon the President. His IHD informed him she was called Mary Johnson, and she worked for EFFECT, meaning that her name almost certainly wasn’t Mary Johnson. She stood in between Howarth and Josette, wearing a dour countenance. In front of them sat a short stack of hardcopy dossiers, which they distributed on his and the President’s assumption of their seats.
‘Mr Garrick, this is Mary Johnson,’ Howarth said. ‘Ms Johnson, this is John Garrick.’
‘How do you do,’ Garrick mumbled. She offered a smile which was insincere.
‘Sir, we have finished our review of the data recovered from the mission station in the mountains,’ Howarth said without preamble, turning to the President. Howarth was an odd man, an incongruous mix of good looks and social ineptitude who much preferred the company of a VI datascrubber to that of his colleagues. Still, he had to have been the best EFFECT commander Garrick had known. Many of his predecessors had been too quick to favour a direct application of force in situations which did not warrant it; Howarth had a lightness of touch which was deeply refreshing. He found it surprising that Aurelius tolerated him, actually.
‘The data was largely burned. Most of what we did manage to recover was scrubbed by the VIs as junk. The EMP element of the provar rail strike, coupled with fairly intense LRIS saturation, has done for a lot of the useable intel. The station records state that a copy of the data was automatically uploaded to the module’s Mantix unit before it was destroyed, but that unit has not been recovered. Our man on Anternis, Karris Haig, has informed me that both the suit, as well as the agent wearing it, were destroyed in the blast. This is unfortunate but to have been expected.’
The President nodded, chewing his bottom lip. ‘Anything useable at all?’
Howarth exhaled loudly. ‘We’re slightly better informed than we were yesterday. We know from speaking with the Vadian Mission Station that there had been a build-up of kaygryn militia in Vos’Shan. They decided to monitor it, did so for a few months and built up a small portfolio of persons of interest. I have the list here, just over ten kaygryn skarls. Bits and pieces of salvageable intel suggest some, if not most of them, are dead. A bit of investigation and inspired guesswork has led us to conclude that there is at least one of these skarls still at large, a male called Commander Iyadi. Karris Haig believes he was killed in the initial strike on Uvolon that destroyed the kaygryn corvette, but on reviewing the information available I believe that he was not.’
‘Who is he?’
‘Iyadi? He’s a skarl, a militia commander. Old enough and with the right history to have been directly affected by Hadan’s Reach. Almost certainly hostile to the UN. It’s more than likely he had something to do with the STO exercise on the Tiberean Mountains, the one which got hit by the second provar rail strike.’ Howarth was flicking through the dossier idly. ‘He and the other kaygryn of interest had access to some very advanced technology. I must admit to being slightly surprised by this. The mission station had been tracking a number of deadzoned habs across Vos’Shan–’
‘Deadzoned?’ Aurelius interrupted.
‘Impenetrable to Long-Range Invasive Scanning, sir. Or at least it would have been to the UNIS gear available on Anternis. Our outpost there was not particularly well funded or equipped.’
‘Right. Shame. Carry on.’
‘We would not have expected to see the Vos’Shan’i kaygryn privy to deadzone technology at all, is the point. A trawl of the black market has revealed nothing.’ Howarth flicked the page over. ‘The corvette was another surprise for us. There is no mention in any of the UNIS inventories of kaygryn hardware of any space-capable naval vehicles on Vos’Shan. The Vadian Mission Station thinks that the clippers were not Uvolonese, but we disagree. UNIS does not have the inclination, equipment or mandate to monitor every offworld flight from Vos’Shan, or the rest of Uvolon for that matter. Going back through Anternis’s civil aviation VI, there were a number of UN passenger flights off Uvolon twenty hours before the time the crusade fleet was attacked. Ten, to be precise. The report from the Vadian deep space relay spoke of ten kaygryn clippers. I do not believe the two to be a coincidence.’
‘You think they fooled the VI? Kaygryn?’ Scarcroft asked. Garrick frowned at that. Scarcroft was usually more prudent.
‘Yes,’ Howarth replied simply. ‘They appear to have access to, and the ability to operate, deadzone technology. Fooling a civil aviation VI, by comparison, is extraordinarily simple. Especially as rudimentary a program as the one Anternis uses.’
‘So the clippers came from Uvolon,’ the President said, shrugging. ‘We still don’t know why they attacked the crusade fleet.’
‘No,’ Howarth said, closing his dossier. ‘But we believe this Commander Iyadi does. Or he knows who does. The official kaygryn response to the crisis has been bewilderingly contradictory and deliberately obstructive. The kaygryn legation on Gonvarion have refused to attend the Grand Chamber, ostensibly because they fear the provar executors, though it should be clear to anyone paying attention that this is only partly true.’
The President wrinkled his nose. Garrick knew that Howarth had not meant to insult the President; he was far too intelligent for that. Too intelligent for his own good, perhaps.
‘So what are you saying?’ Aurelius said. From his tone, his patience was evidently thinning. ‘What’s the upshot of all this?’
‘Our conclusion is that Iyadi needs to be found as a matter of priority,’ Howarth said. Frost and Johnson nodded next to him. ‘We would also like to talk to the kaygryn diplomatic skarls at Gonvarion. That is something that perhaps Xander can arrange.’
