Reclamation (Book One of the Art of War Trilogy), page 39
‘Hello,’ he said. A part of him remained frightened, remembered where he was and how he had come to be here, but at that moment, it seemed like an irrelevant part, a part that could be relegated to the back of his mind with little consequence.
‘How are you feeling, Karris?’ the voice continued.
Now he was sitting at a table on a rocky grey beach. The sky, a dark, striking blue, was thick with clouds, and a vast body of water stretched to the horizon on his left. To his right, a solitary stone tower formed the only feature in otherwise bleak moorland. The air smelled of salt spray, and the occasional trill of a seabird accompanied the rhythmic boom and wash of the surf.
‘Amazing, isn’t it?’ there was a man sitting opposite him. He was dressed in a light blue linen shirt and a pair of three-quarter-length trousers. He was what Haig would consider traditionally good-looking, with strong features, thick dark hair and a close-cropped black beard. He smiled an easy smile of perfect white teeth. He was reclining in the chair, with his hands clasped behind his head.
‘What...?’ Haig managed. His bemusement was starting to intrude on his state of calm, which had until that point seemed fairly unshakeable. ‘Is this real?’
The man smiled again. ‘Nope. Pretty good though. I designed this one myself. I love dramatic skylines like this.’ He traced a line of violent-looking thundercloud with an open hand. ‘All that black cloud and yet – there, look. Blue sky. Others like to do... I don’t know, tropical beaches or jungle treehouses, or even a bloody great desert… but this one’s mine.’ He smiled again. ‘Much more impressive, I think you’ll agree.’
‘I don’t understand,’ Haig said, shaking his head. He found himself unable to leave the chair, but he had at least regained control of his limbs. That both states could exist simultaneously was briefly unsettling but certainly in keeping with the odd physics of his environment.
‘You are a United Nations-Born Terrorist,’ the man remarked. He said it as though he was dismayed he could no longer discuss the sea view. ‘I don’t think you’ll have a hard time agreeing with that.’
Haig opened and closed his mouth a few times. His mammalian mind was rallying against the physics of the environment. He felt calm, but the more he thought about it, the more it felt like an external calm, one that was being imposed on him and slowly rejected by his subconscious mind.
‘Relax,’ the man said. ‘This will be much easier if you relax. I can control your feelings relatively easily, but it’s much better if you talk to me willingly.’
Haig shook his head and wiped the sweat from his brow. He felt his chest constricting. ‘I... what is happening here? Where am I?’
‘You can call me David. I work for EFFECT. This,’ he said, spreading his arms, ‘is my interrogation cell. Like I said, I designed it myself.’ He shrugged. ‘I spend quite a lot of time in here, so I’m sorry to say it suits my preferences rather than yours. You don’t mind, do you?’
‘I…’ Haig’s brow furrowed in bemused concentration. ‘I was expecting…’
‘A deal more pain, I should imagine. We don’t do that here. Pain has its uses, but there are better ways to get information.’ The man who called himself David smiled again when he saw Haig’s expression. ‘Honestly, this isn’t a trick. You’re completely safe here, I promise.’
‘Why are you being so nice to me?’ Haig asked, feeling both pathetically grateful and deeply suspicious. It was certainly not beyond the insane machinations of EFFECT to play some twisted psychological game with him.
‘I want your information. I could torture you, and you would of course tell me what I want to know. I’ll be honest with you, Karris, that’s still an option. But torture takes time, and you would also tell me a great deal that I don’t want to know. My colleagues tortured your friend Commander Iyadi for three hours on a blackworld. Three hours.’ David pulled an expression of distaste that didn’t suit his genial features. ‘The moment they started was the moment he stopped being useful.’
He sat back, clasping his hands on the table in front of him. ‘This being a computer program, we can go as quickly or as slowly as you like, though I can’t stop time altogether; I can only alter our perception of it. This means that time is and remains our enemy, as much as you are an enemy of the United Nations. That makes the length of our conversation now doubly important, since, thanks to you, we are having a great deal of trouble with our friends the provar.’
Haig winced. David’s tone wasn’t exactly angry, but there had been a steely undercurrent to that last part which made him feel like a naughty child. At that point in time, the thought of David being angry with him was unbearable.
‘I know. I’m sorry,’ Haig added ludicrously, not taking his eyes from the table in front of him.
David waved him quiet and leaned forward so his elbows were resting on the table. ‘Listen. I’m going to tell you what’s going to happen, all right? How this plays out is entirely up to you, but essentially we have three options. Number one. You tell me everything from start to finish, right here at this table. I can let you access certain parts of your IHD, you can show me files, pictures, dates, people, whatever.’ David held up two fingers. ‘Number two. You don’t tell me anything. I take you out of this simulation, I flood your system with a cocktail of drugs, I’ve got about ten minutes’ worth of truth to get out of you, then I use very sophisticated and painful techniques to get the rest. As I said before, this takes way too much time and we really are on the clock here.’ He extended a third finger. ‘Number three. We jab a big data sponge into your brain and suck it dry. You die, we translate your thoughts into code at about thirty-five per cent efficiency, and we get the information that way.’
David reclined. ‘Option one is good. Everyone is happy; everyone gets what they want. Option two is bad for me and worse for you. Option three is a total disaster. So, Karris…’ He flashed his easy smile again. ‘…which is it going to be?’
Haig’s mouth felt very, very dry. He thought of Josette and his kaygryn friends. He thought of Iyadi being tortured at the hands of EFFECT agents. He thought about the thousands of UN citizens across the galaxy dying as a direct consequence of his actions. He thought about Lyra Staerck.
‘This is the end of the line, Karris,’ David said softly. ‘The very end. Your part in this plot is long over. I promise you, you will never see any of them again.’
Haig thought about the very real possibility of his own torture and death. ‘I’ll tell you everything,’ he said, with barely a moment’s hesitation.
David all but beamed. ‘That’s what I like to hear.’
PLANETFALL
‘We have and always will directly involve humans in warfare. We do it to remind our civilisation that warfare is not something to be entered into lightly, that lives are and always will be at stake. If the day comes when we wage war through machines and machines alone, our citizens may not perish but our humanity will.’
General George Udis, appearing before a UN Select Committee on the Automation of Warfare
They sat in armoured Mantix pressure suits in the life-support module of the Vekantis, holding high orbit over the grey, storm-wracked surface of Folhourt while Ascendancy mobile defence platforms processed their landing codes. They were posing as a Home Fleet starseeker, the most numerous and easily faked of provari ships. It was a squat arrowhead design, twenty metres in length and with the vast majority of its mass given over to a trio of bulbous FTL engines. Every other scrap of space was covered in ordnance pylons and communications hard points, jabbing into the cold void like the spikes of a morningstar.
As always, the waiting was the hardest part. Simply holding orbit over Folhourt was a nerve-shredding experience, while waves of scanning checked the ship’s electronic logs, its history of service, its payload and occupants. The Xhevegans had built the vessel using the blueprints from UN LRIS scans, authentic Ascendancy construction techniques and materials, and had even crewed it with provar, though Xhevegan rather than Ascendancy. It had taken years of work in a UN blackworld facility, had cost the lives of a hundred Xhevegan provar as they attempted to smuggle themselves offworld on UN-chartered freight ships, and had led to the execution of twelve UNIS agents posing as traders whom the UN had quickly disavowed.
But it had been done.
The hardest, not to mention most expensive part had been fitting the starseeker out with as much UN equipment as possible, and filling it with as many troops as possible, while maintaining the ship’s conventional profile. In the end they had stripped the Goliaths down into their component parts and buried them in the hull, and developed highly sophisticated Mantix programs that could convincingly emulate the physiological structure of a provar down to a cellular level. The same Mantix suits were now broadcasting slow, calm heartbeats; their own, human hearts were thumping with adrenaline.
Jean-Luc Courte’s own heart was relatively calm but only because he was preoccupied. While the troops and Goliath pilots under his command hung in their gel-filled VR syncs with nothing but their own thoughts to occupy them, he was assisting Faunix Siun with their interrogation. Since Commander Howarth’s presidential authorisation code had come through, they had passed the point of no return, and lingering hope of aborting the mission had been snuffed out like their lives were likely to be if they failed to convince the Folhourtian mobile defence platforms.
‘They say that we have above the expected crew occupancy level for this starseeker,’ Siun said to Courte over a private channel. ‘I can’t account for the surplus men.’
It was a problem they had been expecting. With the UN platoon and the fifteen Xhevegan apostates, they were well over the typical life-support capacity for an Ascendancy starseeker.
‘Tell them they are survivors from another ship.’
There was an agonising pause as Siun relayed the information, and Courte preoccupied himself with the VL feed. Folhourt’s orbital traffic was bad at the best of times, but open war had left its voidspace teeming. From the stylised graphics of the VR command centre, hundreds of ships were visible, including a dozen Atlas-class MPVs. They clustered around mobile defence platforms or in Lagrange points, pinging IFF constantly and tracking LRIS across vast swathes of orbit. War had left them understandably jittery. Of course, Earth and Vargonroth would be no different, but that was little comfort to Courte.
The plan, despite having taken a very long time to formulate, was relatively straightforward and depended almost entirely on the seditious elements of the Ascendancy in fulfilling their part of the bargain. For Courte’s part, these supposed UN sympathisers were far too elusive and mysterious for him to have any kind of faith in them, but UNIS had insisted forcefully on more than one occasion that such elements were capable and willing. He was but a lowly EFFECT captain and pulled little weight in high-stakes political manoeuvring, but the smell of bullshit hung heavy in the air.
Once Siun had talked them down to the surface, they would immediately deploy around what the UN had long-termed the Forbidden City, a sprawling temple complex which housed the Zecad. As they descended through the atmosphere, the starseeker would discharge its nuclear ordnance at pre-designated targets, which would simultaneously destroy the City’s guardians and act as the signal for their Folhourtian allies to initiate their rebellion.
Notwithstanding the time that had gone into the plan, Courte still felt desperately underprepared. The operation hinged entirely on how important the provar considered the Zecad to be. Joint Intelligence Command was convinced that they could hold the entire Ascendancy to ransom if they controlled it, but that seemed like a serious stretch to Courte. No one could provide concrete intelligence on what it actually was or contained. Only semi-corroborated conjecture on the subject existed. He shrugged inwardly. Whatever it was, they were to locate it, secure it and hold it while their allies overthrew the Folhourtian theocracy. Anything else was, blissfully, not his concern.
A chime heralded their clearance through the mobile defence platforms. ‘They have accepted my explanation,’ Siun said, his voice so thick with anxiety that for a moment he sounded almost human. ‘They have granted us landing clearance. The nearest suitable spaceport is fifteen kilometres from the Forbidden City.’
‘Okay. Make for it.’
The starseeker curved into a steep dive, making what was ostensibly a beeline for the spaceport. According to the vessel’s navigation grid, they could get within three vertical kilometres of it before they would need to fire their contingent of thirty micronukes and corkscrew into an unforgiving nine-G, high-acceleration trajectory that would see them into the Forbidden City itself.
Courte had been wrong, of course, and the waiting was not the hardest part. The hardest part was in fact those minutes spent powering on near full burn through the roiling, turbulent atmosphere of Folhourt. The starseeker was thrown violently about, kept only on course by its advanced navigational VI and liberal use of attitudinal thrusters, while it was battered by precipitates in various stages of solidity the further they descended, hissing off the thermal panels still glowing from their atmospheric re-entry.
Hearts were pounding even harder now, both human and provar alike. Courte ordered them all to run Fight and Flight, though he knew that most, if not all of them, would not. EFFECT men liked to keep a clear head, and their ability to fight without any IHD stimulants was one of the many things that set them apart from the ordinary UNAF soldiery.
‘Two minutes,’ he said, more out of habit than anything else. They would all be synced to the starseeker’s mission timer.
He accessed the ship’s forward sensors and was afforded, between gaps in the thick grey cloud, a satellite’s eye view of the Forbidden City and its surroundings. At its most basic, the City was a large rectangular shape, three kilometres by two, enclosed on all sides by a ten-metre wall of grey rock. At the northern end was a cluster of buildings with wide, sloping roofs, while the Zecad itself was to the south, a triangular pinnacle of black stone a hundred metres tall, encircled at its base by a temple carved out of the bedrock. Between them was a wide, largely empty plaza, two square kilometres, occasionally punctuated by a statue, but otherwise flat and featureless.
‘One minute.’
They were close enough to the surface now to make out, unaided, large swathes of the landscape. Surrounding the City was an endless sea of barren grey rock, carved by the wind and rain over millennia into thousands of striated crags and gullies. The only visible structures were four elevated roads leading directly away from the centre of each of the four sides of the City. The west road led to the nearest settlement, that which contained the spaceport and which had been marked, alongside twenty-nine other targets, for nuclear destruction. The bare-faced massacre of hundreds of thousands of civilians was something that usually rankled Courte, but given that most provar citizens were as zealous and arrogant as their leaders, it bothered him considerably less. Like most people within UNAF, UNIS, Fleet or EFFECT, he operated under a relatively broad spectrum of xenophobia.
The three-kilometre boundary came and went, and with it, the salvo of nukes. They hissed free of their recessed hard points and zigzagged away on evasion vectors, heading for concealed surface-to-orbit batteries, defensive positions and population centres. They came under sustained orbital fire within a few seconds, as anticipated. Courte had allowed for a contingency of fifteen, fifty per cent of the salvo, and it was just as well. As the first of the mushroom clouds began to blossom on the surface of the planet, the defence platforms had already accounted for thirteen.
There was no time to concentrate on them now. Their own evasion vector had kicked in, a skull-rattling nine-G lateral acceleration which saw them dodge at least five blasts of phase fire and three times as many kinetic rail strikes. The starseeker was jinking all over the place now, its trajectory randomised by the on-board VI, taking a circuitous and painful, but ultimately safer route to the Forbidden City. They only had to endure it for twenty more seconds; UNIS had assured them that once they were over the City’s exclusion zone, the orbital fire would stop. Then all they would have to contend with were the warrior monks who inhabited the City, as well as any other ground-based forces Folhourt deemed it fit to throw at them.
‘Ten seconds,’ he shouted over the comlink, wondering in the back of his mind whether he was going to contribute anything to the mission beyond acting as a clock. He checked the live mission feed to see that fourteen of the nukes had hit home, including that destined for the settlement and spaceport. Initial casualty estimates based on IR scans of warm bodies indicated two and a half million. All four roads had also successfully been knocked out, as well as the estimated locations of the SO batteries. The only target they had missed was a concealed freight landing pad three kilometres away. Important, but not mission critical.
He cancelled the feed just as the starseeker was pulling to a stop over the central plaza. They had opted to land as close to the southern Zecad end as possible, in case the provar decided to try their luck with precision orbital strikes. It also meant that they were as far away from the living quarters as possible, meaning that the City’s attendant monks would have to traverse a good two kilometres of open ground before reaching them.
The starseeker performed a ‘tactical’ landing that was closer to an out-and-out collision with the ground, jolting them all violently within their harnesses. Then the life-support module’s quick release hatch was opened, landing ramps were explosively deployed, and the relatively tiny hangar door was already disgorging Goliath components onto the smooth, flat rock below.
‘Everybody out,’ Courte shouted across the comlink, activating his harness’s quick release via IHD and snatching his railgun from its overhead clamp. Already he could see the starseeker’s prow-mounted rail cannons firing into the living quarters two kilometres away, reducing the buildings to rubble wherever armed provar appeared.
