Reclamation (Book One of the Art of War Trilogy), page 32
He groaned, his voice loud and tinny inside the capsule. Thirty-five hours was an appallingly long time to be unconscious when the pace of galactic events was being dictated by the minute. Despite his grogginess, he pressed on in accessing the Achilles’s data core and brought up all the information he could on the ship’s roster.
‘Oh, Christ,’ he murmured, eyes scanning the holos. They had embarked all ten thousand kaygryn refugees, the vast majority of whom were now reposed in one of Navem Sigma’s vast emergency hangars to await processing and official designation. None had been stored; in fact, he and Lyra had been among the last. Only thirty thousand humans had been embarked after them. One didn’t need to be a mathematician to realise that they hadn’t evacuated anything like the population of Anternis. The roster put the number closer to half.
Further IHD administration revealed a pending message received thirty-three hours before. He cursed at not having noticed it immediately and opened the encrypted missive. It was from Jarvin and read:
Sir
Have tagged ten probables for your Iyadi on the squadron IHD net. Landers have started packing all kaygryn south in the last hour; suspect Sigma is your best bet. Will keep you posted if anything changes here.
Lt. Jarvin
Vondur nodded to himself, once again thankful to have such a competent second-in-command. He cancelled the message and returned to the data core, discovering that he was due to be disembarked within the next thirty minutes. A quick search of the passenger manifest revealed that Lyra had been placed, un-stored, in the cargo hold, guarded by ZEN. He opened a channel to her via his IHD.
‘Lyra?’ he said, then violently cleared his paper-dry throat. ‘Sorry.’
‘I’m here,’ she said after a few seconds.
‘They took the kaygryn then.’
‘Yeah,’ Lyra replied, sounding distant. ‘All ten thousand of them.’
‘Lot of people left behind,’ he remarked, idly conjuring a UI feed on the latest from Anternis. What he saw caused him to start so violently he smacked his head on the ceiling of the capsule. ‘Fucking…’ the expletive died in his throat as his eyes, wide, disbelieving and frantic, absorbed the coverage.
‘Yep,’ Lyra said absently.
Vos’Shan was gone, and in its place was a haphazard network of vast, glowing craters. High-yield, thermonuclear crust-busters had excised the nation from Uvolon and a good four-fifths of its bedrock. Gamma beams, penetrating to a depth of tens of kilometres, had further guaranteed the long-term abandonment of neighbouring Anternis. Thousands of UN citizens were expected to perish from radiation sickness unless they were evacuated immediately. The UNS Jupiter, another cosmic disaster contingency craft, was already frenetically deploying landers, ferrying casualties through a sky so thick with smoke and ash that the sun could barely penetrate it.
The situation in orbit was no better. While he had been comatose in storage, a vast naval battle had raged around the Achilles, forcing it to abandon the evacuation and jump outsystem before it was wrecked. It was clear that the evacuation of the kaygryn had been the final straw. Thirty-three Kansubashi and UN warships had been destroyed, for twelve Ascendancy vessels. The 7th Fleet was in tatters. Reinforcements from all sides were en route.
He pressed on, his mouth agape. The Voscmark Hotel on Gonvarion had been bombed, killing the Xhevegan legation there. Images showed the building with a huge hole gouged in the side, surrounded by emergency crews. Heavily armed ZENs and Peacekeeper Commandos were everywhere. Special Envoy Yano was in a state of technical death, having been stabbed by the Ascendancy executor. Dozens had been killed in the ensuing firefight, as had the kaygryn legation, whose diplomatic cruiser had crashed some five kilometres away as they tried to escape.
‘My God,’ he breathed, his brow deeply furrowed. It was one thing to face an enemy on the battlefield in a fully armed, armoured, refraction and force-shielded Goliath; it was quite another to watch your entire civilisation being sucked into a whirlpool of warfare with no end in sight. Even if Iyadi did hold the key to this crisis, it would take nothing short of a miracle to de-escalate. International tensions had reached fever pitch. Formal declarations of war were hours away, and military operations quickly built up their own momentum. The window for pulling back from the brink would pass them at the speed of light.
‘We need to find Iyadi,’ Lyra said. ‘That’s all we can do. Let everyone else worry about Uvolon now.’
Vondur shook his head slowly. In other circumstances he might have been thrilled. The prospect of a good conventional war was what he had trained for. Now, all he felt was a deep sense of dread.
‘Focus, Captain. It’s not too late to stop it. The kaygryn are the key – Iyadi is the key. Let’s find him.’
Vondur grunted, his resolve hardening. ‘You’re right. Of course you’re right.’
‘Did your men make any progress on Uvolon?’
‘Yes,’ Vondur replied, ‘they’ve identified ten possibles. All of them have been tagged.’ He forwarded the IHD markers – small, pulsing blue arrows – to Lyra. He pulled up the ship’s manifest again. ‘They’ve disembarked all kaygryn into Navem Sigma.’
‘I know,’ Lyra replied.
‘They’re being contained by Habsec.’ Habsec was Navem Sigma’s security force, run by the quorl for the last decade irrespective of the official rotational programme. Given the zeal with which they performed the task, however, the other races had come to accept their de facto tenure as the station’s police.
‘I know that too. And I don’t like it.’
‘Why?’
‘I’ve been going through the contingency procedures for the Achilles. SOP in a situation like this is to contain everyone in the holding area until they’ve been registered.’
‘Which is what they are doing?’ Vondur said slowly.
‘No,’ Lyra replied, ‘not with UN citizens. They’re being let straight through.’
‘Okay…’
‘Captain,’ Lyra said, allowing a note of frustration into her voice, ‘doesn’t it strike you as odd in this period of heightened tension that they would contain all the kaygryn but not the humans?’
Vondur snorted. ‘I wish it did. They’re kaygryn, Lyra. Habsec probably doesn’t want them here at all.’
‘No, this is more than racism. Such a direct breach of such a fundamental protocol… the kaygryn are being contained for a reason.’
‘There’s doing your job and then there’s paranoia,’ Vondur said. ‘I–’
‘Paranoia is my job,’ Lyra snapped. ‘Someone else is looking for Iyadi.’
Vondur sighed, unconvinced. ‘Even if you’re right, there’s nothing we can do about it now,’ he said, pressing his hands up against the cold interior of the capsule. ‘I’ve got twenty-five minutes before they de-store me. I can issue a UNAF executive command for all the good it will do, unless you can speed things along?’
‘No,’ Lyra replied, deflated. ‘I’ve lost contact with most of UNIS’s data stores now. Again, SOP. They think I’m dead, but they can’t confirm it, so they’re disavowing me.’
‘Tough break,’ Vondur said.
‘I would shrug if I had shoulders,’ Lyra replied, and Vondur couldn’t help but laugh.
They waited out the next twenty minutes in silence. An information blurb appeared to Vondur a few moments before he was due to be released, and then a smooth mechanical whir pervaded the capsule as it was decoupled from its connecting seal. His stomach dropped as he underwent a confusing shift in orientation. He had no idea how storage capsules were usually unloaded from a CDCC like the Achilles, so he was quite surprised when the whole process took less than a minute. There was a hissing sound as the capsule seal was broken and the lid was pulled off.
‘Just one minute,’ a crewman in grubby overalls said as he undid the harness. Vondur came free from the straps and allowed himself to be pulled out of the capsule.
‘You’re fine,’ the crewman said after performing a quick IHD diagnostic and slapped him on the shoulder. ‘Follow the signs.’
‘I need to get to the cargo bay,’ Vondur said, keeping his eyes locked on the crewman’s eyes instead of on the awesome, cavernous interior of the Achilles’s hold. It was like being in some vast cylindrical mausoleum, three hundred metres in diameter, with storage capsules lining the walls like half a million coffins. Huge yellow robotic arms fussed over the capsules, detaching them from the hold walls and plugging them into the disembarkation nozzles lining the bottom of the ship. Vondur himself was in the hold’s central axis, a small, cylindrical beam three metres in diameter mounted by a number of rail-driven elevators. Crewmen were floating around everywhere with small jetpacks, checking their holos for passengers who hadn’t taken well to the storage.
‘No can do, buddy,’ the crewman said. ‘Off limits to passengers.’
‘My ZEN is in there,’ he said, beaming his UNAF Captaincy credentials directly into the man’s eyes. ‘It is very important that I get it back, and the case it is carrying, immediately.’
The crewman looked genuinely frightened. ‘O-of course, sir,’ he stammered, opening a holo in front of him. ‘I’ll have them waiting for you in the disembarkation hangar.’
‘Thanks,’ Vondur grinned, slapping the man on the shoulder considerably harder, and mounted the nearest elevator.
‘Captain Vondur,’ Lyra’s voice sounded in his ear. ‘I’m impressed.’
‘Not just a pretty face,’ he replied, as the elevator sped down the rail at two G.
It took him ten minutes to get out of the Achilles, weaving through the mass of confused, storage-dazed civilians clogging the major disembarkation routes as they pulled themselves along fat, netting-lined docking umbilici. A few small portholes afforded him a view of the station’s massive solar power vanes and a glimpse of Gamma Serpentis itself, its surface wracked by violent storms.
He pulled his way through the crowd, using both hands and feet to scale the thick white plastic netting like an ape. At the far end he had to wait for the Achilles’s xenopathology suite to scan him in case he was carrying any alien viruses or bacteria into the station. Given its closed atmosphere and population density, they took the possibility of any viral introduction very seriously.
Once cleared, he pulled himself through the airlock and into the station’s central axis. He was immediately directed into a huge cargo elevator that powered down one of the transport spokes to the station floor, where gravity was thankfully close to Terran standard. At the base of the spoke was a huge, wide hangar, easily five hundred metres across, currently crowded with thousands of kaygryn civilians being herded into queues by beleaguered Habsec agents. Across the walls were large holo screens, some displaying live news feeds, others directing humans and kaygryn in both Terran and Argish. The air was thick with panic and chatter. Every time the news feeds showed a picture of the remains of Vos’Shan, a collective wail of anguish would ripple through the crowd.
Vondur moved to an alcove next to the base of the freight elevator and reactivated the squadron markers which Jarvin had sent him. All ten kaygryn were inside the hangar.
‘ZEN, where are you?’
‘We have been retrieved from the cargo bay, Captain, and are making our way into Navem Sigma. I have accessed the station’s VI and can see you on the security cameras. If you remain where you are, we will be with you in less than five minutes.’
‘Okay. As fast as you can, please.’
‘Of course.’
Vondur cancelled the feed and looked around. There was barely a human in sight, and every new tranche of humans that was ferried down by the freight elevator was shepherded straight through one of the hangar’s multiple exits, into another, smaller hangar beyond. A large holo above the door read ‘priority access only’ in green lettering. Habsec manning the doors were not letting any kaygryn through.
‘Christ,’ he said to Lyra over his IHD, as he saw another image of the radioactive wasteland that used to be Vos’Shan. ‘You’d better hope Iyadi is here. He sure as hell isn’t there any more.’
‘We’ll be with you in two minutes,’ Lyra replied tersely.
Vondur checked his pistol in his chest-mount holster and zipped his jacket up. It was cold in the hangar, despite the balmy temperature inside the hab proper. He caught glimpses of it intermittently through the opening priority access door, a ten-kilometre curved stretch of city and tiered pasture, a vast tract of land hemmed in by two ten-kilometre slices of thick clear plastic which allowed the sunlight in.
ZEN arrived a minute later, carrying Lyra’s armoured holdall in one hand.
‘I want to speak to Habsec,’ she said via ZEN’s chest speaker, ‘to the left, by the gate.’
Vondur’s brow creased. ‘How can you see them?’
‘ZEN has accessed the hangar’s security cameras and is feeding me a direct link,’ Lyra replied. Vondur looked at ZEN next to him.
‘Good work.’
‘Thank you, Captain.’
They moved through the crowds of kaygryn, many openly howling at the destruction of their country and the loss of their loved ones. They kept clawing at Vondur and ZEN, and at first Vondur thought they might have been begging, or even trying to get information out of him. It was only after one of them tried to force something into his hands, a small token, that he realised they were thanking him for the evacuation, for saving their lives. Despite everything the UN had done to ruin them as a species, they were pathetically grateful.
He felt terrible then. He had seen a considerable amount of civilian suffering in his time as a Goliath pilot, more than most UN citizens were even aware of on their comfortable, wealthy Veigis-Class worlds, but this outpouring of grief and gratitude tore the soul. He couldn’t even begin to fathom their suffering.
‘I’m sorry,’ he began to say repeatedly as they pressed through the crowds. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’ He must have refused a thousand trinkets by the time they reached the Habsec line. The quorl there were clad in armoured, form-moulded pressure suits, looking like Mantix-clad insects, their mirrored visors impassively reflecting the tortured expressions of a thousand kaygryn. Vondur was seconds from accosting the closest when Lyra stopped him.
‘What is it?’ he asked, slightly annoyed.
‘Over there.’ ZEN pointed vicariously to the far right corner of the hangar, to a cluster of humans clad in black Mantix. Each had EFFECT printed in white between the shoulder blades. Surrounding them were crates of equipment, and all were armed with railguns. The commander, denoted as such by the stripes on his shoulder guards, was engaged in animated conversation with a Habsec officer. Both were helmetless.
‘What are they doing here?’ Vondur asked.
‘They must be looking for Iyadi,’ Lyra concluded decisively.
‘How do they know about him?’
‘We were openly tracking him on Anternis. I sent reports personally to the Vadian Mission Station,’ Lyra replied. ‘They all contained details of Iyadi. It was not a secret. SOC must have reached the same conclusion as us.’
Vondur hesitated. ‘I don’t like this,’ he said. ‘Not with what’s happened.’ He was still no closer to deciphering what had transpired with his Goliath. He hadn’t ruled out some kind of false flag operation.
‘Just as well we don’t have a choice, then,’ Lyra replied. ‘If Iyadi is here, there’s no way we can bag him without EFFECT knowing. They’ll lock this whole station down in microseconds if they have to.’
‘If they find him.’
‘Captain,’ Lyra said impatiently.
Vondur pulled a sour face. ‘Shit.’ She was right, but it didn’t mean he had to like it. ‘I hope you know what you’re doing,’ he muttered and walked purposefully over to the agents, ignoring the wall of kaygryn to his right. He stopped just short of the commander and cleared his throat loudly.
‘Commander?’ he said.
The man was tall, taller than Vondur, with dark hair and a hard, grim face. A scar ran down his right cheek like a lightning bolt. Vondur would have put him at mid-forties.
‘Halder,’ the man replied. His voice was as grim as his face. ‘Who the fuck are you?’ His eyes flickered to the ZEN standing next to Vondur. Behind Halder, his men were slowly turning to face them. The Habsec officer watched him blankly, mouth parts clicking.
‘Captain Ben Vondur, Goliath pilot, 11 Squadron,’ Vondur said. Halder remained impassive. ‘This is… Special Agent Lyra Staerck. UNIS.’
Halder’s gaze slowly lowered to the crate ZEN was carrying, then back up to Vondur. He raised an eyebrow. ‘What is this, a fucking joke?’
‘Just show him, Ben,’ Lyra said over his IHD. Vondur nodded to ZEN, who opened the case, revealing the head, helmet and artificial body still ensconced within the memory gel bed. Halder cast his eyes over the arrangement.
‘Grief,’ he remarked quietly.
‘Commander Halder,’ Lyra said through ZEN’s chest speaker. ‘As you may have been able to guess, I have been decapitated.’
‘Yes,’ Halder said drily. ‘Something of a workaholic, Ms Staerck?’
Vondur, irrespective of the circumstances, had to stifle a snort.
‘Commander,’ Lyra continued patiently. ‘I was based on Anternis. I was tracking a number of kaygryn skarls before the attack. One of them was called–’
‘Iyadi,’ Halder interrupted. ‘We know. We know about you, too. Does SOC know you’re alive?’
‘No,’ Lyra said quickly, ‘and if it’s all the same to you, I’d like to keep it that way for the time being.’
Halder grunted in amusement. ‘Suit yourself.’
