Reclamation (Book One of the Art of War Trilogy), page 38
‘On the table,’ one of the agents said, in a voice that would normally be accompanied by someone checking a wristwatch and sighing. Haig knew that on the table was the last place in the galaxy he wanted to be, yet he found the powered Mantix exoskeletons of his captors very persuasive. Within a matter of seconds he was lying on the cold steel slab, and one of the agents was placing an open hand on the side of his head.
‘Wait, wait just one minute, I just need one minute, please–’ was all he managed before there was a buzzing sound, then a flash of light and finally an electrical crack, and he was completely paralysed.
‘You watching the race tonight?’ he heard one of the agents say to the other as they entered the lift. Then the doors closed, and they were gone.
*
The relay had become full of junk. Freeze-dried ration wrappers floated languorously about the cramped hold, bouncing gently off the exposed wires and pipes, spinning and colliding and trailing crumbs like voidbreakers sowing mines. It was strictly against protocol, though the days when crumbs and wrappers could have any kind of detrimental effect on UN electronic consoles were long past.
Javik and Horst had not left their seats since the kaygryn clippers had attacked Crusade Fleet Sixteen. Running on stimulants and freeze-dried rations, they had watched their holos relentlessly, neither daring to move for fear of missing something. Dry-eyed and bleary, they scanned constantly for any further sign of rogue kaygryn ships and departing provari forces, and all the while reported back to the Vadian Mission Station through sublight communications in tired, nervous voices.
They were besieged by LRIS, and the relay’s electronic countermeasures were slowly failing, tripping offline one by one as the redundancies burned out and their refraction shielding aborted barrier by barrier. If it continued, their stealth capabilities would be gone within an hour, well before any kind of rescue would arrive. It was something that neither man could bring himself to consider. Instead, they focussed on the data and the dull, distant crusade fleet. For hours now it had been shedding mass as the Ascendancy Home Fleet was battered by UN railguns and called for reinforcements – or so their codebreaker suites informed them. It was hard to imagine the provar losing any conventional naval battle, but Javik supposed they couldn’t win every one either.
He munched absentmindedly on a freeze-dried roast dinner bar as another ten destroyers slipped away from the fleet like a flock of birds and disappeared into ten infinitely black event horizons. Horst dutifully relayed the information in a tired voice, while the computer logged it with a bleep and a wink of holos. It was simply another piece of information from a very long log of information that slowly, inexorably, pointed to one rather alarming fact: the crusade fleet was slowing down.
They had known for a while, of course. With the advanced discrimination programs that they had running, every trend imaginable was deduced from the data and logged in split-second increments. Something as major as a decrease in fuel burn from seventy-five per cent of the entire fleet was heralded with everything short of the main system alarm. With the situation with the UN such as it was, they had anticipated loss of mass to supplement the Home Fleet, but not the effective reversal of the entire crusade line. The addition of close to a hundred thousand provari ships entering the melee would put their victory beyond doubt, though the UN would certainly make them pay for it. Because of that, neither he nor Horst seriously anticipated the war to go on for much more than a few weeks or months.
The same, sadly, could not be said for them.
‘Refraction failure in twenty-eight minutes,’ Horst said, reading from a holo to his right. Perspiration marked his brow, despite the perpetual cool of the relay’s interior.
Javik exhaled loudly. ‘Shit,’ he announced eventually, throwing the wrapper of his roast dinner bar into the air. It span lazily towards the ceiling and was sucked against the mesh that covered the atmospheric scrubbers. It sat there, flapping slowly, sending tiny, moist brown crumbs across the interior of the relay.
Horst cancelled the live feed with a wave of his hand and sat back, adjusting his baseball cap. He looked older than he ever had done, with the beginnings of a grey beard sprouting from his chin and cheeks, and deep lines crowding his eyes and forehead. Javik had known the man for close to a year, but he had the kind of easy-going manner that had made it feel like much longer.
They had prepared messages for their loved ones, Javik for his wife on Navem Sigma, Horst for his two daughters on Earth. They would transmit via the FTL comms array a few minutes before their refraction shielding failed. That had been emotional. Javik had been married for five years, and he had planned to conceive children during his next off-relay rotation. He had told his wife to move on, to find another husband, to have lots of children. Then he had started uncontrollably weeping and so erased the transmission and re-recorded it. The VR sync was soundproof, so he didn’t know what Horst had recorded, but the man had come out red-eyed as well, and then they had embraced and wept. It wasn’t the impending death that reduced Javik to tears; it was the sense of loss and longing, the thought of his wife weeping, and the thought of all the things he had never done and had wanted to.
That was all done with now. All that remained was to watch their time tick away on the holo, to listen to the electronic whines of the consoles as the provari LRIS burned them like a man in an acid bath, and to eat the very finest of their freeze-dried rations.
‘You know,’ Horst said, floating out of his seat and over to his holdall strapped into the webbing on one of the walls, ‘I completely forgot I had this.’
‘Had what?’ Javik asked, turning in his own chair to see the older man pull a plastic bottle out of his holdall. It was brown, with a sky-blue and sunburst label, a waxed cork and a silver ribbon encircling the neck. Despite everything, his face split into a grin.
‘You... ridiculous bastard,’ he said as he saw the stylised picture of the provari soldier on the front of the label, wearing a turquoise sarong and wielding his caldar at the drinker.
‘Ascendancy Rum,’ Horst said, his own face creasing into a broad grin. He floated back to the chair and grabbed the two tumblers off the console in front of them and then pulled a utility knife out and started on the wax.
‘How long have you had that?’ Javik asked, incredulous.
‘A very long time,’ Horst said, his voice edged with melancholy despite his smile. He uncorked the bottle, letting it spiral away, and plugged it with a drinking tube. Javik looked at the time. They had twenty-five minutes left.
‘A toast,’ Horst said, flicking the live feed to the Vadian Mission Station back on.
‘Who are we drinking to?’ Javik said. He felt suddenly giddy, a strange mix of dread, anticipation and excitement.
‘To Anna, your beautiful wife, to Shayla and Denise, my two beautiful daughters... to those motherfuckers in the VMS,’ he said, shouting the last bit directly into the live-feed mouthpiece, ‘thanks for nothing.’ Javik laughed. ‘But most of all, cheers to our dear, dear friends, the provar. Samman Zecad, hai!’ Horst said, raising the bottle.
‘Samman Zecad, hai!’ Javik shouted in reply, laughing so hard he cried, and taking the bottle from Horst, he swallowed down a long draught of the fiery rum.
They managed to finish the bottle just as the LRIS finished their shields.
Javik was still laughing as the point defence laser cut into the relay.
*
Fifty thousand kilometres above Sophia’s sea level, the Janitor satellite prepared to make its thirtieth scheduled scan of the hour. The scheduled scan happened to coincide with the satellite’s fifty-first random scan of the last twenty-five-hour period, and in a rare act of self-determination, the Janitor’s fairly rudimentary VI decided to combine the two for efficiency.
The level of activity required was minimal. The Janitor had scanned Sophia’s high-orbit zone many millions of times in the last century, and its Recursive Self-Improvement software had made it very good at doing so at the smallest possible expense of energy. With forty seconds to go, it opened the two dome-shaped LRIS modules on either side of its hull and the recessed full-spectrum scanners emerged like the stamens of a flower.
Each stamen unfurled a sail-like vane, packed with high-density, cross-spectrum nodes. To the seventeen crewmembers of the EFFECT voidbreaker holding low orbit, it would have looked almost like two giant squids locked head to head, each tentacle sprouting a flower of circuitry. Like the voidbreaker itself, however, the Janitor was comprehensively refraction shielded, and the crew had only anecdotal evidence of its presence.
Once the Janitor’s scheduled scan clock reached zero, the LRIS stamens emitted a five-second burst of energy that shot away from the satellite in two expanding domes of radiation at the speed of light. On board the EFFECT voidbreaker, alarms were triggered – as they had routinely been for the last four hours – as once again the LRIS wave hit their electronic countermeasures like an Aldarian hypertrain, tripping fuses, burning circuits and delivering the on-board VI the electronic equivalent of a baseball bat to the face.
The Janitor knew about the voidbreaker. It had already told the Beta Thani Mission Station of its presence. The mission station had long since acknowledged the Janitor’s message and confirmed the authorisation the voidbreaker had given it. It did the equivalent of quietly pocketing the voidbreaker’s IFF reply.
What was troubling the Janitor was the ghost chatter it was picking up from the high-orbit band. It was not emanating from the EFFECT space plane, which was so painfully obvious on the satellite’s VL scanner that it was like a second sun had erupted on the face of the planet. It was also not emanating from the voidbreaker in low orbit. The problem was, after those options were eliminated, the Janitor did not know where else the signal could have come from.
It dredged the memory banks of its passive AO scanner, a shorter range, less accurate low-power scanner, but with the convenience of being Always On. The banks revealed the same, albeit with less clarity: ghost chatter in the high-orbit band.
The Janitor did the equivalent of a frown. It analysed the chatter. It was Foreign, certainly, bearing none of the hallmarks of UN comms protocol – even the secret codes. Its codebreaker suite revealed nothing in the known spectrum.
The Janitor repowered its LRIS scanners and fired out another burst. The now agitated voidbreaker pinged back another IFF response, but the Janitor practically ignored it. It was looking at the pattern of the chatter, mapping it across the high-orbit band and comparing its progress across the entire spectrum. It looked to the satellite like the remnants of a single, hyper-high-frequency burst of data, originating from the surface of the planet, though quite different from the earlier two-way EFFECT communication to Earth.
The Janitor was worried now. It tried again to scan the occupants of the voidbreaker and those on the surface of the planet, receiving a host of angry automated warnings from half a dozen Mantix suits, but again turned up nothing except the partial profile of Vondur. Indeed, the earlier unregistered alien was dead.
The Janitor ran that new fact through its Logic suite to see if there was a pattern. Within a few microseconds, Logic had identified a likely seventy per cent correlation between the death of the unregistered alien and the high-frequency transmission.
The Janitor scratched its digital head with a digital hand. Its analysis of the ghost chatter – little more than junk data proliferating across the comms bandwidth – couldn’t pull together a destination either. The Janitor checked its Context bank, as updated from Beta Thani twice a year, to see if there was anything in existence which the pattern could be compared to. Within three seconds, the bank had come back with two options: the high-frequency transmission was analogous to EFFECT Death-of-Agent protocols, or it was a warning.
Anxiety in VIs was more comparable to human confusion than actual emotional anxiety, and the Janitor was incapable of panic. Had it been, however, it would have been positively sweating. Sophia had been undisturbed for a hundred years, lulling the Janitor into a century-long sabbatical consisting entirely of meditation and quiet introspection. Now, it had no choice but to activate its Engagement Modality.
The moment it did, three things happened.
Firstly, the Janitor broadcast an External Conditions Hostile Warning to the voidbreaker. The satellite’s first priority was to ensure that the planet was not disturbed, but its second was to ensure the safety of any humans in the vicinity. Insofar as it was able to divulge non-classified information on the nature of the problem, it did so.
Secondly, the Janitor brought its long-dormant though routinely inspected and serviced weapon systems online. Its electronic warfare pods, a trio of hemispherical bulges clustered on its hull like warts, thrummed into life. Recessed hard points slid open, revealing ordnance pylons bristling with Star Witch, flak cannons and a triplet of point defence lasers. Its LRIS vanes opened and stayed open, and began pinging every ten seconds. Its refraction shields powered to full intensity, and its high-G dynamic thrusters came online.
Thirdly, an alien ship of untraceable origin and design jumped into the mid-orbit zone and destroyed the Janitor satellite with one swift blast of phase fire.
*
Paralysis was every bit the nightmare Haig had imagined it would be. Inside his head he was raging, screaming, bouncing off the walls and pummelling them until his fists were bloody. He was sprinting into the distance, the cool air blasting his skin, heaving down into the bottom of his lungs like an avalanche. He was dancing like a maniac, he was kickboxing in zero gravity, he was hypersledding on Bospen…
Except that he was doing none of those things. Once it became clear that, for all the will in the world, his limbs wouldn’t even twitch, his heart palpitated so hard it felt as though it would burst in his chest. But it was worse than that: he couldn’t even feel. The cold metal of the table had vanished. He knew he was breathing only because he could hear it in his pounding ears. He didn’t even realise he was sweating until the beads on his forehead trickled into his eyes and blurred his vision.
It was then he panicked. He would even have taken the guards – the expressionless, impassive, disgusted guards – as company over this intolerable solitude. He would have traded everything he owned for a good old-fashioned kicking, anything to feel again, even if it was to writhe and adopt a foetal position while he was pummelled with heavy boots. The highest levels of agony were infinitely preferable to this mind-bending numbness.
His eyes, wide and frantic, had no option but to drink in every aspect of the pyramid above him. Blacker than the blackest obsidian, its point rested directly above the bridge of his nose, and where at first it had seemed ominously featureless, now he could see lines on it, seams and indentations which hinted at something, some machinery, contained within. He knew that whatever was going to happen to him, the pyramid was going to be somehow involved. Given the circumstances leading up to his presence beneath it, it was also unlikely to be a pleasant experience.
His half-terrified reverie was broken as his tongue flopped loosely down the back of his throat, forcing him to breathe through his nose. He quickly set to hyperventilating, which lasted for about thirty seconds before his chest was overcome with a slow crushing sensation that managed to puncture his shield of numbness. The tightness spread to his neck and jaw, and he realised, as his vision began to fade, that he was having a heart attack.
Tears pooled in his eyes and dribbled down his cheeks. The crushing sensation slowly morphed into pain and spread to his arms. His breathing slowed and became distant, and his vision consisted of little more than the smallest circles of light, as though his eyes had receded into his skull and their sockets were connected to thousand-metre concrete tunnels.
His dedication to the kaygryn cause bled out of him as quickly as his vision faded. That bitch Josette was probably off somewhere screwing all the Joint Chiefs and drinking wine and laughing at a sting operation well done, watching his torment on some screen in SOC with a big fat grin on her face. Iyadi was probably dead, stupid, self-important Iyadi who had used him for his own ends and deserved everything he got. The whole mission had been juvenile and pathetic, and now thousands and thousands of his countrymen were being killed as a direct consequence of his actions.
He tried to conjure up the reasons for his hatred of the UN, why the alternative and its undoing seemed so preferable. As his expiration neared, the most sobering thought was his ennui. Had he fallen for Josette? She was undoubtedly attractive. He was bored in UNIS, looking for excitement. Had he ever believed in the kaygryn cause? Only facing death could he admit it to himself. It’s all fun and games until someone gets hurt, but, apparently, only when the someone was him.
The pyramid opened. With an almost imperceptible hiss, a thin black proboscis wormed its way out of a hole just left of the point and slid into his temple like the needle of a tyre pump. Immediately the pain in his arms, neck and chest died away, and he felt himself regain control of his mouth, though a very loud scream which he had planned died in his throat as he was quickly rendered unconscious.
When he came to, he was floating above the Earth.
‘Hello, Karris,’ a man’s voice said.
Haig didn’t – couldn’t – move. But this time, for whatever reason, it didn’t matter. Indeed, he felt no desire to move. Instead, he was almost overwhelmed by a deep feeling of relaxation and tranquillity. He watched, content, as the Earth rolled slowly beneath him. He was... aware. It was almost as if he could feel the billions of lives beneath him, existing on the surface of the planet.
