Reclamation (Book One of the Art of War Trilogy), page 33
‘You’re tracking Iyadi, then?’ Vondur asked.
‘Aren’t you the guy who started this whole thing?’ Halder asked, making a show of peering at him.
‘We’re tracking Iyadi,’ Lyra said. ‘We have intelligence on his whereabouts.’
‘If your intelligence is “this hangar” then we can take it from here, thanks.’
‘Hey!’ Vondur snapped, jabbing a finger into the man’s chest. Halder watched the offending digit emotionlessly as it poked his Mantix. ‘Do you want our help or not?’
Halder wrinkled his nose and looked up to the ceiling. ‘Yes,’ he said after a short period of reflection. ‘Actually I do.’ He threw an upward nod at ZEN. ‘This can-opener takes orders from you?’
‘That’s right,’ Vondur replied.
‘Outstanding. I’m jealous,’ he added with unfeigned sincerity. ‘You’re armed?’
It was a courtesy; even without his helmet on, Halder’s suit would have invasively scanned Vondur for armaments the moment he stepped within a hundred metres of him.
‘Just a pistol.’
‘Will it kill an adult male kaygryn?’
Vondur looked slightly taken aback. ‘I would have thought so.’
‘Then it’s all you need. What intelligence have you got for me?’
‘Before we left Anternis, I had my squadron scan the crowds for any kaygryn bearing a strong likeness to Iyadi. They turned up ten probables, IHD-tagged. All ten are in this hangar.’
Halder looked genuinely impressed. ‘Resourceful,’ he said, nodding. ‘Send them over.’
Vondur obliged the man, and Halder’s eyes took on a slightly vacant look as he reviewed the tags.
‘That was well done, Captain,’ he said. He fell silent again, and a shift in the behaviour of the surrounding EFFECT agents told Vondur that Halder had distributed the marker to the rest of his detachment. ‘All right, here’s the deal. Habsec is already preventing any kaygryn from leaving. We can make our lives easier by separating out the males from the females and kids – Habsec is going to put up messages in Argish on these boards.’ He indicated the large holos lining the hangar walls. ‘Once we’ve done that, we’ll check out your probables, then the rest if we have no luck. I’ve got twenty men with me, so we’ll spread out and do it in ten groups of two. You two…’ He indicated Vondur and ZEN. ‘… can be the eleventh. Clear?’
Vondur nodded. ‘Yes.’
‘Outstanding. We move out in two minutes.’
Halder headed back to brief his men, and Vondur turned around so that he was facing the kaygryn. ‘Get that railgun ready,’ he murmured to ZEN, eyeing the crowd. Emotions were clearly running high. ‘I have a feeling we’re going to need it.’
ZEN obliged, strapping Lyra’s armoured holdall to its back and deploying the rail carbine Vondur had given it on Uvolon, gripping it with both hands.
After the promised two minutes, Halder reappeared. ‘We’re ready. I’ll be here with Habsec,’ he said, gesturing to the habitat entry gates behind. ‘The sooner we can bag this motherfucker, the sooner we can be out of this shithole.’
He turned smartly away and made for the back wall, where a line of armoured Habsec officers and their quorl commander waited. A few moments later Vondur’s IHD chimed, informing him that he had been granted access to the closed EFFECT comlink. He had expected a sudden stream of chatter to clutter the net, but the bandwidth was silent. They had good comms discipline, though on reflection, that was to be expected.
Vondur turned to ZEN. ‘Give Agent Staerck access to your optics and audio feed.’
‘Yes, Captain,’ ZEN replied, then, in Lyra’s voice, ‘Thanks, Ben. I didn’t want to just jack in… I thought it would have been rude.’
‘Don’t thank me,’ Vondur replied. He watched as the mass of kaygryn slowly parted like the Red Sea, with the females and their children moving over to the right-hand side of the hangar in a confused, slightly panicky mob, and the males remaining on the left. There must have been a good four or five thousand males to search through, though thankfully none of the IHD markers had been mistakenly assigned to a female.
There were some shrieks as the EFFECT teams quickly dispersed into the crowd, jostling and shoving their way through the packed aliens. The shrieks quickly turned to angry, affronted snarling, and it did not take long for all five thousand to join in so that the hangar was filled with a deafening crescendo of indignation. It was intensely intimidating, but beyond that harmless, and it did not dissuade the EFFECT teams from ploughing on. Of course, thought Vondur, it was easy for the EFFECT agents. They were equipped with railguns – railguns coded to their Mantix so that they would not fire even in the unlikely event of their disarmament. Their Mantix suits themselves also contained a suite of weaponry, from deployable high-resonance blades which could slice clean through steel, to microsilos stocked with vast quantities of lethal and nonlethal ordnance. Even the nanofibre weave which coated the gel matrix and armour plates underneath could emit a violent electronic pulse to reduce the strongest man to a spasming, pissing wreck. He, by comparison, was wearing a comprehensively unarmoured jacket and combat trousers and had come equipped with a pistol that would happily put a whole magazine through him in the wrong hands.
He sighed resignedly and brought his pistol out of its holster, and he and ZEN followed suit, moving into the channel created by the EFFECT teams, searching methodically, heading specifically for any tagged aliens. Either side of them, male kaygryn roared and raged, gesturing angrily and making deep, derisory clucking noises. Once again, he was desperately glad to have ZEN with him; the aliens seemed much more reluctant to approach the VI with the railgun than the much less impressive human with the much less impressive pistol.
There could be no doubt that, on a civilisational level, the kaygryn hated the UN. Kaygryn militia groups had waged a violent and bloody guerrilla campaign in the wake of Hadan’s Reach, leading to a much expanded UNIS and EFFECT presence on all shared kaygryn worlds. Because of the inherent difficulty in understanding Argish and the wilful ignorance the UN displayed in understanding kaygryn culture, any subsequent counterterrorism operations were heavy handed and counterproductive. The negative reaction to the presence of the EFFECT agents on Navem Sigma was deeply unsurprising, and the agents were hardly taking pains to minimise their footprint. One thing was certain in Vondur’s mind: making arrests now was going to get violent.
They reached the first tagged kaygryn, a dark brown, crop-furred male with a head of long, dark blue barbs flowing down his back where human hair would ordinarily grow. He waved his vestigial arms about maniacally, producing a resonating cluck cluck cluck that emanated from deep within the chest cavity. Above his head, the turquoise marker flashed invisibly.
‘Well? Is it him?’ Vondur asked, facing a wall of kaygryn whose anger had reached fever pitch. Without the protective armour of a Goliath encasing him, he had never felt so vulnerable in his life.
‘I… I honestly don’t know,’ Lyra’s voice replied via the ZEN’s speakers.
‘Christ, Lyra, they’re ten seconds away from tearing us limb from limb, is it him or isn’t it?’
‘I… don’t think so,’ she replied.
‘Shit,’ Vondur breathed, looking around to see if he could see the other agents. The crowd was too densely packed. ‘We’ll take him anyway,’ he decided. The kaygryn was looking at them suspiciously now, probably wondering why they were spending such a long time in front of him.
‘I don’t think we should,’ Lyra replied, her voice tinged with worry. ‘This was a mistake. There must be a better way of drawing him out.’
‘If we arrest this one we might spook the real Iyadi,’ Vondur said. ‘That would draw him out.’
‘Or we might get killed.’
‘Lyra, I thought you were a field agent,’ he teased, moving towards the tagged kaygryn. He had hoped that being cavalier would have given him more courage, but approaching the packed mass of furious bodies, he wasn’t so sure.
‘I’ve got some serious activity here,’ one of the EFFECT agents announced suddenly over the net. ‘Something’s… cover!’
The explosion wasn’t large, but it wasn’t small either. Vondur looked over to see a cluster of mangled kaygryn bodies jump four metres into the air, debris, limbs and rich red blood flying in all directions and carried on a wave of acrid smoke. Among them, a pair of EFFECT agents, their Mantix nanofibre rigid from absorbing the blast, cartwheeled slowly away like an acrobatic duo at the circus. For a split second there was silence, and then a wall of sound slammed into him like a tidal wave, a cacophony of screams, roars, commands, comms chatter and the shrill, penetrating station alarm accompanied by a sudden whirlwind of amber warning lights.
Around Vondur, kaygryn dropped to the ground as if someone had switched them all off, leaving him, ZEN and the EFFECT agents the tallest things in the hangar for three hundred metres. Immediately he saw an armed kaygryn male sprinting across the far wall behind the females and children. One of the markers pulsed above his head.
‘There! I see him!’ Vondur yelled over the net, breaking into a sprint. ‘ZEN! Get him, there! Everyone else on me!’
The VI quickly overtook him, its heavy legs crunching fingers and toes and limbs as it powered through the mass of bodies. Vondur, by contrast, had to barge his way through as the kaygryn slowly returned to their feet. It took him a while to realise that they weren’t wailing at him; they were cheering Iyadi.
Habsec officers were moving now to close Iyadi down, clustering round the gate into the habitat with weapons up, but Vondur could see Halder gesturing at them furiously to take him alive. In that brief moment of hesitation, Iyadi opened fire. Blinding blue pulses exploded from the weapon’s muzzle, searing straight through the Habsec body armour as though it were paper. Half a dozen quorl dropped, smoke spilling from their charred insides. The rest tried to fall back into cover, but Iyadi was merciless. Another two stroboscopic sprays and twelve quorl lay dead.
‘He’s got a fucking plasma rifle,’ one of the EFFECT agents snarled over the net.
Vondur wasn’t listening. Iyadi was through the gate now and into the habitat. The plasma rifle was powerful, but the usually single-shot weapon would be close to overheating after such a lengthy and inexpert discharge.
‘Stop him, Captain!’ Halder shouted over the link. Emergency bots were already swarming over the scene, and blast shutters were unfolding over the station’s observation ports. The holos around the hangar were flashing with red-and-white warning graphics in Argish and Terran. Behind him, the EFFECT agents were firing on the kaygryn males as they mobbed them, using nonlethal rounds and shock pulses to blast them into unconsciousness. Even though they were practically invincible in the Mantix suits, they still had to wade laboriously through five thousand bodies. Vondur and ZEN were the only ones clear.
Vondur sprinted across the open space, past the steaming Habsec bodies with their blackened, cauterised wounds. He saw ZEN barge his way ahead through the priority access gate and into another crowd, this time of humans. Iyadi had already cleared a path through them, however, allowing ZEN to run almost unhindered through the secondary hangar. Vondur felt a stitch gnawing at his guts and cursed his six-month soft detachment. He and his squadron had grown fat and lazy on Anternis.
His IHD ran Ice in response, a UNAF-grade stimulant program which immediately eliminated the stitch. He felt energy flow to his muscles and his breaths ease and deepen. His pace easily increased. His feet slammed against the floor plate with such large and powerful strides that he covered the hangar within twenty seconds, and in another three he was through the gate at the far end and into the habitat proper.
Running into the interior of Navem Sigma immediately instilled within him a mind-bending sense of vertigo. He had been to habitats before, but none as massive and ambitious as this one. Entire cities hung from the ceiling twenty kilometres above like gleaming stalactites, and through the three ten-kilometre plastic window sections, he could see the station’s massive power vanes glittering in the starlight and the huge orb of Gamma Serpentis visibly moving as the station rotated.
‘He’s making for a transport,’ ZEN said.
Vondur looked about him. The station’s main transport system was the zero-gravity central axis, connected to the walls by maglev elevators, but Iyadi was unlikely to be that stupid. That could be overridden and locked down remotely.
‘Where?’ Vondur shouted instinctively, so focussed on giving chase that he’d completely overlooked the marker still pulsing over Iyadi’s head.
A new tag appeared on his vision from ZEN. Three hundred metres to his right. He’d entered the station at one of the fringes of a quorl-ethnic city, though their buildings and accessways were similar enough to those of the UN as to be easily navigable. He continued his sprint down a broad, carbon-polymer road, turned right at the junction and saw ZEN ahead, with Iyadi a good hundred metres beyond that.
‘Get him, ZEN!’
‘Come on!’ Lyra added, her voice tense.
‘I cannot reach him,’ ZEN said, defeated. ‘Sorry, Captain.’ It was strange to hear the VI speak without gasping for breath. Vondur saw a cruiser pull away from the ground ahead in a harsh blaze of engine fire. ZEN had been just beyond arm’s length.
‘Shit,’ Vondur snapped. He had his IHD link with the station VI and searched the vicinity for a car. He found one just round the corner, a powerful Vequidin C40 cruiser. ‘ZEN, this one,’ he said, beaming it a marker.
‘Captain, I cannot steal a civilian car,’ ZEN protested.
‘We aren’t stealing it; we are commandeering it,’ Vondur said.
‘Yes, sir,’ ZEN replied. There was a babble of data chatter and the doors opened. Vondur dived into the pilot’s seat while ZEN climbed into the passenger’s side, its movements clumsy and awkward with Lyra strapped to his back. The cruiser hummed online thanks to ZEN’s electronic wizardry, and Vondur wrenched the control column back on full power, steaming into the air at a hundred kilometres an hour.
‘Thank you, Jarvin,’ he muttered to himself, endlessly grateful for the IHD tag. Iyadi may have been resourceful, but he was a rotten driver. The cruiser zipped through the air so erratically that within two minutes of it being stolen, the station VI had assumed control before it could be ploughed through one of the habitat’s windows.
‘We’ve got him now,’ Vondur said, grinning like a mad man. He ramped up the thrust until they pulled alongside Iyadi, and they watched him as he wrenched the control column in a futile fit of pique.
‘Can you make it from here?’ Vondur asked ZEN.
‘No, he can’t,’ Lyra said.
‘Yes, I can,’ ZEN replied, kicking the passenger door. It squealed off its hinges and tumbled to the farmland a couple of hundred metres below, narrowly missing an agri-mech as it speared into the ground. The station VI immediately sensed the damage to the cruiser and tried to intercede, but ZEN overrode it with a smooth stream of data-packed gibberish.
Iyadi was to their left now, barely ten metres away. Vondur eased the control column across to bring ZEN within jumping range–
‘Ben!’ Lyra shouted through ZEN’s speaker. The hold was suddenly filled with searing plasma bolts, punching through the alloy, the roof, the windshield, every penetration leaving a glowing yellow hole in its wake. Vondur flinched violently as a bolt punched the control column clean in half. Another speared the engine block, setting off an alarm inside the cockpit. ZEN managed to jump clear of the Vequidin before the engine spluttered and died entirely, pitching the cruiser forward and affording Vondur an unparalleled view of the field directly below.
‘Damn… it…’ he managed, his hands finding the ceiling before the harness pulled him hard against the seat and jet nozzles appeared from all sides, drenching the hold in impact foam. The fall to the ground lasted the best part of ten seconds. Vondur yelled all the way down, clawing instinctively through the syrupy foam that now filled the hold up to his sternum. The absent passenger door meant that much of it had leaked out.
The impact was nowhere near as violent as he had anticipated. Moments before the cruiser hit, air cushions burst from the bodywork, softening the initial blow. The gooey foam as well acted much like nanogel, absorbing and redistributing the force. The windshield shattered thanks to the structural weakening caused by the plasma bores, and smashed fruit and soil ploughed through the new gap, but what force the cushions and gel could not absorb, the deep, soft soil did. The cruiser ploughed and settled into it rather quietly.
Vondur remained seated in the cockpit for a minute, allowing the Ice to wear off. His IHD ran several medical diagnostics, reporting minor lacerations of his face and arms from the shattered windscreen, but he was otherwise fine. He started laughing, then, the shock of it pervading his entire system. As soon as the impact foam de-solidified, he undid the harness weakly and climbed out the back door, pulling himself out of the impact crater and on to a sticky layer of soil and mashed fruit. It must have been some kind of quorl analogue.
He searched for the marker on his IHD. Iyadi’s cruiser had come down as well, two hundred metres away.
‘ZEN? Lyra?’
‘We are all right, Captain. We were thrown clear.’
‘Where are you? Are you near Iyadi?’
‘No, Captain. I believe he remains in the vehicle.’
‘Okay,’ Vondur breathed. He wiped some blood from his eyes where the lacerations on his forehead had leaked before being coagulated by his IHD, and pulled his pistol from its holster. He armed it and broke into a jog towards Iyadi’s cruiser, his joints protesting despite the residual Ice in his system.
He reached Iyadi’s cruiser. It had come down harder than Vondur’s, judging by the extensive damage to the frame and the badly torn impact cushions. Inside he could see Iyadi slumped over the steering column, impact foam slowly evaporating around him. Blood was dribbling from a dozen gashes in the kaygryn’s head. Some of his barbs had been entirely severed, and they leaked some kind of bluish tissue fluid.
