Reclamation (Book One of the Art of War Trilogy), page 31
‘They are innocent civilians, women and children and unarmed men,’ Yano said in veshx-Han’ghar, modulating his voice so that it projected calm respect. ‘All we want to do is move them somewhere safer.’
Predictably, Xavanis ignored him, preferring instead to unleash a stream of FP too quick and enraged to comprehend. Folgana added his own voice to the mix, the pair of them babbling away like angry lunatics, gesturing furiously and drawing a significant amount of attention from the surrounding tables. A few of the ZENs at the end of the room twitched. Yano’s IHD sensors informed him they were being actively scanned by a few ZEN marksmen.
‘Listen, all I’m asking is that you pass on the message to your masters,’ Yano continued, trying to placate them. ‘Tell them that we intend to evacuate kaygryn civilians.’ He stumbled again on ‘civilians’, and settled for repeating ‘women, children and unarmed men’. ‘We will protect them with force if necessary. You are asked by my President personally to let us evacuate them without hindrance.’
He managed to get the message across, after a good twenty minutes of repeating and cajoling and enduring insults and outbursts, all while his starter sat cooling in front of him to the point of inedibility. The executors understood the request, of course; whether they would oblige it was another matter entirely. By the time the exchange had ended, there were three ZENs less than two metres away, surrounding them like statues.
Eventually, and unoriginally, both Xavanis and Folgana stood, practically shaking with rage, and stalked angrily from the room, leaving a wake of confused, though not entirely surprised, diplomats. Voctorick Gee, who had been lingering a few tables away unwilling to interrupt, had since decided to sit with a few compatriots of his who had cleared a space for him. It seemed that the rest of their table’s designated inhabitants had followed suit. The result was that Yano, Codey, Tanja and Kaivan were sitting entirely by themselves on a table redolent with twelve starters, surrounded by armed guards and observed by just about every set of eyes in the room.
‘Don’t join the Exigency Corps,’ Yano said to Kaivan, tucking wearyingly into his tepid fish. ‘Get out while you still can.’
He prepared a short brief as he ate and sent it back to Vargonroth, informing them of what had happened. They didn’t hear back from the executors all night, though their table remained stubbornly empty throughout all six subsequent courses. Kaivan eventually gave the diplomatic gifts to Velsze in their entirety. Yano told the zhahassi to sell them, and he wasn’t joking.
After dinner, Codey gathered up Kaivan and Abena and took them on an introductions spree, since half a diplomat’s job was making the right contacts and there was no better place to make them than at a Tier-Three summit. A thin, reedy noise filled the air that Yano eventually decided was music. Most of the room’s occupants were now drunk, or on their way to being drunk, as evidenced by the general increase in conversational volume. Yano had been careful not to get too drunk, but he was maintaining a pleasant, warm buzz. Tanja, next to him, was rosy-cheeked, enjoying the formidable Vhalyssian wine.
‘So what’s it like, working for Andrea?’ he asked after a few minutes of relatively comfortable silence. He could see Constance on another table, ensconced by zhahassi.
Tanja looked at him, looked away and snorted. When she looked back she was smiling. Yano felt a brief flush of adrenaline. It was a gorgeous smile.
‘That’s so shit,’ she said, taking another sip. Yano had to stifle a look of surprise. ‘Such a shit line.’ She smiled again, then laughed to herself. ‘I know how the Exigency Corps operates. You know it’s deeply, deeply unethical to use your training to seduce someone?’
‘I asked you what it was like working for Andrea Constance,’ he said, doing an excellent impression of someone taken aback. ‘I agree, that would have been a shit line, if it had been one.’
Tanja rolled her eyes. ‘Okay, Special Envoy.’
‘That’s very arrogant,’ he said with enough seriousness to wipe half the smile off her face. The tiniest hint of panic flashed across her eyes. He took a sip of wine and pressed his advantage home. ‘Not to mention incredibly unprofessional to assume I’m flirting with you.’
She looked at him quizzically, searching his features for a good thirty seconds. ‘No…’ she said after a while, shaking her head. ‘No, I don’t believe you. Sorry.’
He laughed this time and shrugged. ‘Believe what you like.’
There was another silence while she regarded him. She took another sip of wine. ‘It’s fine. She’s actually very nice,’ she said.
Yano nodded reasonably. ‘She’s good. I can imagine.’
‘Can you?’
‘Christ!’ he said, laughing again. ‘If you don’t want to talk to me you don’t have to.’
She shrugged, focussing on her glass. Yano watched her as her eyes traced the room, taking in the mass of informal diplomacy. ‘I don’t dislike you, Zavian,’ she said, staring ahead. ‘I’m just… tired of your bullshit.’
He frowned in incomprehension as she turned and fixed him directly in the eye. ‘I’m not some…’ She waved a hand in the air. ‘… arbitrary mid-level diplomat you have to seduce with what you undoubtedly consider charm and wit, Yano. Do you think you’re being subtle? Because I can tell you, you’re not. I know you want to fuck me.’
Yano’s eyes widened at that. ‘Tanja, I–’
‘So for Christ’s sake, can we just get on with it?’
*
They reached the back of the cruiser before she kissed him, savagely, pushing her mouth hard into his. He responded in kind, his lips engulfing hers, tongues rammed in each other’s mouths. It was inebriated, careless, excessive, a parody of passionate kissing. Neither cared. She was viciously frantic, fuelled by potent zhahassi intoxicants; he was pent up and desperate for her.
He yanked one of her shoulder straps down and bit into her neck. She gasped with delight, thumping the interaction panel and sending the cruiser into the air at speed, heading for the Voscmark. She pulled him closer, aided by the punishing acceleration forces, finding his lips again.
‘Fuck,’ he breathed, pulling away and sliding the other strap of her dress down. Her bare breasts, cream-pale, spilled free, and he grabbed them both with adolescent zeal, squeezing, fumbling, sucking hard on her nipples. His IHD performed an automatic search for any cyber-erotica programs she had installed and found 2Climax quietly syncing so that they would orgasm together. They landed at the Voscmark barely five minutes later. Yano pulled away from her as she pulled her dress back on, then led her by the hand into the building, practically running, driven by evolutionary, mammalian instincts to copulate.
‘Come on,’ he breathed, smiling and flushed, as they travelled down the hallway, past the silent, dutiful ZENs and straight to his room. She giggled as he threw the door open, amused by his desperation, and ran ahead of him, her dress sliding off her in her wake. She was wearing nothing underneath except a pair of smooth black stockings.
‘Oh Christ,’ he groaned, drinking her in. She was perfect, worth a thousand genetically manipulated Charlotte Ashas. He watched, entranced, as she lay down on the bed, smiling at him with that perfect smile. Scarcely more than five seconds passed before he was stripped and on top of her, his IHD intervening to contain his orgasm the moment he entered her. Tanja half-screamed as her 2Climax program brought her similarly to the brink, before aborting at the last moment. They both laughed then, locking eyes and lips, before Yano reared over her, pinning her hands behind her head and boosting one of her legs up so that her calf was pressed against his shoulder. He built up an intense rhythm so that the bed started to shake and a layer of heat and sweat accumulated between them.
A deep, concussive explosion rocked the Voscmark, severing the power and triggering an array of deafening alarm klaxons.
‘Jesus fuck!’ Yano shouted as the entire building shook violently. Tanja screamed over the alarms and grabbed her dress from the floor. Outside, swift footsteps thumped through the corridor as the building’s ZENs activated and sprinted through the hallways, burbling with data chatter. A bomb. It had to have been a bomb. Emergency lighting flickered on, bathing the room in wan red light.
‘I don’t know,’ he said as his IHD flooded his system with Fight and Flight. His drunkenness melted away like ice under a flamethrower, replaced with combat levels of mental acuity. He tried to open a channel to Codey, but the link was dead. The EMP from the blast had scrambled his comms module. Further troubleshooting revealed his IHD was in a bad way, running on redundancy systems. Another hit like that and he would be running on good old-fashioned brainpower alone.
‘What was that?’ Tanja shouted as the muffled yet unmistakeable shriek-bang of rapid railgun fire emanated from the floor below.
Yano grimaced, feeling his forehead break out in sweat. He was up now and pacing the room. ‘We need to go, and we need to go now,’ he said, running a hand through his hair. ‘Is your IHD working?’
‘It’s – no,’ Tanja replied, on the verge of the same panic Yano would have been experiencing had he not been under the rationalising influence of warfare stims.
‘Okay,’ he grunted and repeated it over and over as he hastily pulled his clothes on. Once dressed, he ran over to the wardrobe, fished out a small strongbox from the top shelf and opening it, pulled out a small grey rail pistol.
‘What are you doing?’ Tanja shouted. Yano shoved the pistol into the back of his trousers and walked up to her.
‘You’re going to be fine,’ he said, kissing her. Her lips tasted of salt, and something stirred within him, deep, unfamiliar feelings of affection that even the Fight and Flight coursing through his bloodstream couldn’t overcome. Something to think about later; at that moment, his first priority was ensuring her safety.
‘You need to get to Codey, tell him what’s happened.’ He held the side of her face, though her expression was already hardening – and that was without the benefit of drugs.
‘Okay,’ she said, nodding once and breathing deeply. She was frightened, but admirably calm. ‘Find Bal. Tell him what’s happened.’
‘I’m going to get a ZEN to get you out of here,’ Yano said. ‘All right?’
She nodded again, and he grabbed her hand and led her to the door.
The alarm in the hallway was even louder than in his room. He left Tanja and jogged down the corridor and back to the entrance hall, where he found himself detained in seconds by a railgun-wielding ZEN.
‘On the ground, immediately,’ the VI commanded. Yano dropped straight to the floor without a moment’s hesitation, not willing to stake his life on the situational awareness of an alien robot.
‘I need your help,’ he shouted, the marble of the floor cold against his face. ‘I have a civilian with me. I need to get her out of this building.’
There was a brief melodic babble as the ZEN communicated with its squad leader. Evidently its electronic make-up was made of stronger components than his damned IHD.
‘Special Envoy Zavian Yano, you are not supposed to be here,’ the ZEN said. ‘Get up.’
He did as he was told. ‘I have Tanja Henrikson with me,’ he shouted. The high, vaulted ceiling was allowing the alarms to reverberate, compounding and intensifying the volume. ‘She’s a communications officer in my team. She’s VIP. I want to get her to safety. Can you please take her to my cruiser?’
If the ZEN had an eyebrow to arch, Yano was sure it would have done so. After another babble of data exchange, it said, ‘Where is she?’
‘My room. I’ll take you there.’
‘Yes,’ the ZEN said. Yano immediately broke into a run, hearing the heavy metallic footsteps of the VI behind him. He reached the room in thirty seconds and threw the door open. Tanja was sitting on the end of the bed, staring at the floor in an IHD trance. She looked up and then flinched as more gunfire echoed from the floor below.
‘Time to go,’ he said, the Fight and Flight making him sound regrettably brusque and dispassionate. She nodded, and he kissed her again. ‘I’ll come and find you as soon as I can.’ He turned back to the ZEN. ‘Please, take care of her.’
The ZEN offered a single nod, shouldered its railgun so that it was pointing down the corridor and led Tanja away at a running pace which it had calculated as her optimum.
‘Right,’ Yano breathed to himself once they were both out of sight, then turned and jogged down the hallway towards the nearest set of access stairs. Once he had reached them, he pulled the pistol free, feeling its comfortable weight in his hand, and descended them two at a time.
‘Shit,’ he hissed as a particularly loud gunshot sounded through the door in front of him. He could hear shouting now and more data chatter passing between the networked ZENs. ‘What are you doing, Zavian?’ he muttered to himself, reaching for the handle. He twisted it slowly and pulled, to see an empty corridor, apparently untouched by the fighting.
He stepped out, pistol pointing ahead in a distinctly amateur fashion, searching left to right. He decided on left, traversed the length of the corridor and turned into a wider hallway – before immediately hurling himself backwards as a hail of rail rounds chewed up the wall in front of him.
‘Fuck!’ he shouted, fumbling the pistol. The hallway was a wreck, a black starburst of shattered stone, obliterated furniture and charred, flash-cooked body parts. The explosion had ripped a hole in both the interior and exterior walls ten metres across, and had punched through both the floor and the ceiling. A hot breeze from outside whipped through the hallway, carrying with it the sour stink of death and melted modern materials.
‘Yano, what the fuck are you doing here?’ shouted a familiar voice. Yano turned around to see Jean-Luc Courte and a handful of heavily armed men behind him, some clad in armoured vests with EFFECT stencilled across the back, others in regular clothing, all holding a wide variety of assault railguns and micromissile pods. Another salvo of high-energy gunfire stitched up the hallway, tearing chunks out of the walls and spraying Yano with chips of stone and dust. At the end of the corridor, he could hear the unmistakeable shouts of Xavanis.
‘I have no idea,’ he admitted. He winced as a ZEN twenty metres to his left took a direct hit in the optical cluster. Its head exploded backwards in a shower of transparent transmission fluids and ruined VI components. It crumpled to the floor like a ragdoll and was dragged away by one of its comrades.
‘You’re not supposed to be here. Fuck off now, before I shoot you myself.’
Yano, still sitting down like a moron, backed away from the corner until he felt he could stand up. ‘What the hell happened?’
‘A bomb, that’s what happened. The provar decided they’d had enough of your Xhevegan friends.’
Siun suddenly appeared in Yano’s mind, the easy-going, pleasant provar whom he’d been a complete shit to. The thought of his mangled, explosively dismembered body in the hallway was almost enough to override the Fight and Flight and make him vomit.
‘Oh… shit,’ he said, bringing a hand to his forehead. ‘They killed them all? How many?’
Courte shrugged. ‘Fifteen, twenty.’
‘I can’t… it doesn’t…’ Yano stammered. Another high-pitched salvo of ordnance smashed down the corridor. One of the ZENs returned fire, this time with a single, precision blam from a scoped railgun. From the sound of the screams of rage and pain, it had scored a hit.
‘Special Envoy,’ Courte said calmly and with a reasonableness which went well beyond what Yano deserved. ‘It is very dangerous here. People are dying. Please, for your own sake, leave before–’
Thanks to the drugs still flowing through his system, Yano didn’t even feel the caldar as the point burst through the front of his chest. He watched as Courte’s eyes widened in slow motion, and at least six guns pointed at something just over his right shoulder. The muzzle flashes were blinding, lightning bursts of blue-and-yellow fire. Slugs of tungsten speared through the air, travelling so fast they barely spun, and hit something soft and fleshy behind him.
He felt hot provari blood and brain splatter the side of his face, and the caldar slice through his lung as it was jerked backwards, cutting a deep trench down his back. The alarm had become a distant roar, barely audible. His IHD informed him that his lungs and liver had been bisected and advised him to seek medical assistance before he died. He would have laughed at that, had he not collapsed backwards with blood foaming from his mouth.
‘Somebody get a medic here!’ he heard Courte scream. He sounded far away, like he was shouting through a concrete tunnel a kilometre long.
The last thing he saw was the large, impassive helmet visor of a zhahassi Peacekeeper Commando, before he slipped blissfully into unconsciousness.
III
CAUSE AND EFFECT
‘Opportunities multiply as they are seized.’
IYADI
‘Never fear to do what is necessary, my children, for ours is a higher purpose.’
His Most Excellent and Ascended Majesty, the Ghengari-Zecad Vhon IV
The clicking flash of the capsule’s harsh white lights dragged him from the unconsciousness of storage and into the stale, recycled atmosphere of the Achilles. Bleary, confused and dehydrated, it took Vondur, quite irrespective of his combat conditioning, a good five minutes to reorient. Once he had achieved an acceptable level of wakefulness, a pounding headache announced itself, and he grabbed at a water tube dangling above him and sucked the two-litre bladder half dry, setting his empty stomach to growling. The absence of any substantial nutrition in the last couple of days had left him feeling irritable and weak.
The capsule wall, no more than fifteen centimetres from his face, sensed his return to consciousness and flooded with graphics and text. His journey time had been twenty-one hours, though he had been in storage for closer to thirty-five. Information about the safety and process of storage – essentially that of inducing a deep coma to enable ships like the Achilles to triple its life-support capacity – flashed up comfortingly in a holo of mint green. Other scraps, encouraging him to drink all the water in the bladder, swirled about. The latter he obliged, then cancelled them all.
