Reclamation (Book One of the Art of War Trilogy), page 4
During the many months of training, what surprised him the most was just how many of the things he’d heard about the Corps, and dismissed as utterly fallacious, were true. Charisma, after all, only got one so far, and then the UNDC’s more subversive methods came to the fore. Yano had been trained in how to flirt with women and homosexual men. He had been trained to flatter and seduce, and how sex and the promise thereof was one of the most powerful techniques in the ambassador’s employ. He had been trained how to threaten, either verbally or subconsciously, and how to wield his IHD’s Mindjack software. He had undergone armed and unarmed combat training, for when it all went wrong. Everything, from compliments to lovemaking to fighting, everything was a tool to be used to gain an advantage. Once this gruelling regime of training was over, then, and only then, did the cosmetic enhancement begin. After weeks of what could be termed surgery, they had made him into an Adonis, gifted him a body of sculpted muscle and perfect features based on thousands of hours of psychological and psychosexual research into the perfect man. He was genetically charming, the very essence of what it was to persuade, calm and incite. Men and women would follow him, obey him and fall in love with him. Yet this new, perfect body was as much a prison of responsibility as it was a key to a life of limitless hedonism.
The UNDC’s ethics programme had been as long as it had been tedious. He had been taught the diplomatic history of the UN and the power of words to pre-empt wars, to defuse all situations, to calm and to assuage. The weapons in his arsenal were there to coax the tyrant into submission, to soothe the wronged from engaging in combat and, if necessary, to encourage the weakling into just war. They were not, under any circumstances, to be used for personal gain. It was called the UN Service, after all. They had been shown videos of the executions of disgraced Exigency Corps personnel, those who had been caught running vast criminal empires, or been involved in high-profile sexual scandals. They were held to a much higher standard than ordinary people and would be punished accordingly.
Unfortunately for Yano, it turned out that, upon completion of the five-year intensive training period, deep traits of narcissism had come to the forefront of his Character Map. The cosmetic enhancement quickly made him vainglorious, his new sexual prowess, promiscuous. Unsatisfied with the Corps’s VI training programmes, he honed his skills on real women the galaxy over, seducing and bedding them in ever more hedonistic ways. His lack of sexual experience from his youth only compounded his libido; his abundant, perfect charisma became simply a means to achieving IHD-enhanced orgasms.
He concealed his activities as best he could. Often there was no need; many succumbed to the temptation as quickly and as easily as he had. He heard rumours that initiates were given some leeway for the first few months; many tired of the playboy lifestyle as quickly as they started it, settling into the respected and important role for which they had been groomed. Yano, on the other hand, had surrendered himself totally to profligacy. Sex and seduction became a game, and he was an exceptional player.
After a while, he had had to keep his activities utterly secret. Such was the hedonism of his personal life that, if it became public, he would be disgraced and ejected from the Corps. The extravagant state dinners, the diplomatic parties, the travelling to beautiful and exotic corners of the colonised galaxy, all would be snatched from his grasp. In all likelihood, he would be stored for a few years as punishment and then ditched on some Terran hellhole.
Most importantly, delectable dishes like the Undersecretary for Xeno Ecology’s daughter would be forever unobtainable. The circles he mixed in meant that there was always a daughter or girlfriend or wife of someone important to pursue. Nine out of ten times he could seduce them and bed them – the risk of being discovered only added to the thrill of it. Provided they were old enough, and he did not have to persuade them beyond the bounds of consent (obvious ethical considerations aside, most UN colonies operated a mandatory death penalty for rape), everyone was fair game. Including the chubby Port Warden’s daughter he was currently thrusting his cock into.
He had been sent as an ambassador to the Emergency Trade Federation on Bashik under the mandate of the Exigency Corps, the wing of the UNDC trained specifically to deal with the direst diplomatic incidents in the UN sphere of influence. Most Tier-Three players had similar teams, all trained in xeno etiquette should an interspecies situation develop. In the last two weeks, the ETF had seized control of Voga City spaceport following the planet’s embargo on shipments to the Golgron Alliance. It was a reasonably typical occurrence and had taken Yano less than a day to solve. Apparently the UN had been seeking to depose of Bashik’s current governor anyway, which had given him an absurd amount of leverage.
The rest of his time had been spent in the lamentably awful diplomatic quarters of Voga City, waiting for his charter offworld. The Port Warden’s daughter had seemed like an obvious target, comely and flirtatious and an easy lay. Too easy, as it had turned out.
He sighed, bored of his current conquest. She was no Undersecretary for Xeno Ecology’s daughter. She had been a class act. He smiled as he remembered her, flowing black ball gown hitched up about her waist, underwear about her ankles, face half-pressed into an oil painting of General George Udis as he took her from behind. Well, it had certainly made the speech more interesting…
But he was broken from his reverie by the Port Warden’s daughter’s sudden and loud moaning. He looked away from the mirror in front of him to see her grasping the pillow with both hands, her plump face pressed into its fabric so as to stifle her gasps. His brow furrowed in annoyance. At least she had great tits. They swung back and forth like pendulums as he reared half-heartedly behind her, her nipples rhythmically brushing the duvet. It was enough to tempt him into climaxing, but he had his IHD contain it. He would come exactly when he wanted to – and when he did, his IHD would make her come as well.
Of course, it didn’t work the other way around.
‘Oh my God,’ the Port Warden’s daughter suddenly announced and within seconds their coitus ended. She slid forward off him, thighs jerking and spasming, her face pressing harder in the pillow. Yano studied his own baffled expression in the mirror.
‘Are you… coming?’ he asked, watching her jerk and moan. He wondered if anyone had made her orgasm before and felt a strange pang of regret that he might be the first.
She hadn’t heard him. After thirty seconds of deep breathing, she brought her face up from the pillow and manoeuvred onto her side, smiling up at him.
‘Mmm,’ she moaned airily, newly confident, her eyes half-lidded. Her face was flushed and lined with perspiration. Yano hadn’t moved, still on his knees, still fully erect.
‘That was… amazing,’ she said, smiling and then giggling. Yano offered an insincere half-smile, frustrated he had been denied his own climax.
‘But I’m not done!’ he said, employing a sexy, playful tone. He moved so that he was lying next to her, his cock resting on her thigh. Obligingly, she wrapped her hand around it, and making an expression that he assumed was supposed to be one of false coyness, finished him off.
He got bored after thirty seconds and had his IHD make him ejaculate. She squealed, partly in revulsion as it shot onto her stomach. That gave him some satisfaction.
It took him half an hour and a regrettable amount of empty promises to get her to leave. Once she had, he went immediately to the small shower cubicle at the far end of the room and cleaned himself. He whistled tunelessly as the hot air vac-dried him, and then he exited the cubicle and walked naked back into his quarters.
‘Holo on,’ he muttered and stood at the foot of his bed as the wall behind it transformed into the hypersled post-race review. He wrinkled his nose in annoyance. The Golgron Alliance had comfortably beaten the Kansubashi Raiders in the Galactic Super League, temporarily killing the Kansubashi captain and three spectators in the process. A highly animated argument was taking place on the track itself, with two of the racers – Kansubashi’s Tsomo Ashigara and the Alliance’s number six (even with his IHD’s phonetic pronunciation guide, he failed to pronounce the name correctly) – coming to blows.
‘Ridiculous,’ he muttered. He cancelled the holo after the crash was replayed for the third time and clothed himself in a navy-blue jacket, cream breeches and high-stock collared shirt with a patterned silk cravat. To his left lapel he pinned his Exigency Corps Xeno Division brooch, a red-and-yellow sunburst inlaid with a pair of silver hands, one human and one alien, clasped together, the words Verba pro Militia embossed above them. Once he was satisfied with his appearance, he stuffed his personal effects into his bag, ordered the door to the dank hab open and stepped out into the undecorated carbon-concrete corridor of the Seadon Hotel.
The smell of damp was almost overpowering as he strode down the corridor and towards the stairs. To call it a hotel was charitable. Supposedly he was based in one of a selection of suites permanently seconded to the governor’s office, which was perhaps why Bashik had such a poor track record of diplomacy. The Diplomatic Corps’s quarters on Earth and Vargonroth were palaces (an actual palace in the case of the former), beautiful old ornate buildings with large and luxurious state rooms, haute cuisine and a dedicated waiting staff. The Seadon Hotel was a squat block of grey carbon concrete on the edge of Voga City, four thousand kilometres from the governor’s office and the rest of Bashik’s administrative apparatus, and almost completely automated except for the local vermin, the ‘plague vole’. Not for the first time in his life, Yano was grateful that he was immune to every disease in the galaxy.
He made his way down the stairs and out through the main entrance of the hotel, checking out with his IHD. Outside, the thick, smoky air of Voga City greeted him, along with the intense summer season heat of the local M-class star. He immediately began to sweat uncomfortably in his suit and took his jacket off and stuffed it into his bag.
A few moments later, a small mailbox icon flashed into life in the top left corner of his vision, and he brushed a fingertip over the activation button below his left eye socket. A large, translucent calendar sprang into life in front of him and was quickly superimposed by an urgent encrypted missive from UNSOC headquarters. He frowned at that, given his current orders were to return to Earth for debrief. A new message, and one directly from Solar Command (rare in itself) would automatically supersede them, and undoubtedly meant a particularly dire situation which, at that moment, he did not have the stomach for.
He briefly toyed with the idea of not reading it but quickly relented with a sigh. It had come from Xander McKone after all, the head of the UN Diplomatic Ministry, though his direct superior, Bran Savach, had hijacked it somewhat to make himself seem more important. He stood on the steps of the hotel as he read the short statement:
Special Envoy Yano. Report to the Fleet Auxiliary voidbreaker Blue Bolt immediately. Further orders will be provided en route. Transport waiting at dock 15b, Voga City spaceport. Full diplomatic dispensation is in effect.
– Xander McKone, UNDM, Vargonroth
He cancelled the display to see, as if on cue, a Voga City Police Department cruiser pull up to the base of the steps. It was a sleek, rotor-driven shuttle, black and white and tigered with fluorescent yellow strips, crewed by a pilot and a civil compliance officer who manned the hatch-mounted railgun. The compliance officer, clad in full police-issue Mantix body armour, unhooked himself from the safety rail as the cruiser came to a stop and stepped onto the pavement.
‘Special Envoy Zavian Yano?’ he asked, except that with the Mantix software suite and its access to the UN’s Bashik database, he already knew exactly who he was.
Still, Yano obliged the courtesy. ‘Officer,’ he said and proffered a hand. The policeman took it, his grip firm and his armoured glove cold to the touch.
‘I have orders to take you to the spaceport as a matter of urgency.’
‘Yes, I imagined you would,’ Yano replied.
‘Right this way, sir.’
The officer pulled him into the cruiser’s hold, which was formed of four seats and a small detention unit. He sat in one of the seats and strapped himself in while the officer resumed his position behind the railgun, perched on the floor of the hold and with his feet resting on one of the cruiser’s landing struts. A few moments later, the cruiser’s rotors roared to full power, and they were flying through the city at speed.
It was moments like these that Yano lived for. Police and military escorts, especially the urgent kind, were the ultimate ego trip, irrespective of what any other member of the UNDC claimed. They tore through the city at breakneck speed, a screaming, flashing cacophony of turbofans, sirens and stroboscopic blue warning lights, shunting other traffic out of the way with automated civil compliance subroutines as they soared through Voga City’s tower blocks and arcologies.
The trip to the spaceport took less than ten minutes. The Emergency Trade Federation ships were still withdrawing under the terms of the agreement which Yano had brokered, but despite their lack of impetus, he expected them to keep their word. He had deposed of Bashik’s UN governor implausibly swiftly, which had defused the situation in the space of a few hours. They called it Summary Diplomacy, and it was what they were all supposed to aim for: swift, conclusive and lasting terms without a shot fired.
They cruised through the many low-orbit elevator pylons and wide, circular platforms, most occupied with grounded freight traffic. The chunky yellow-and-red ETF ships swarmed through the port like a mob of fat insects, spewing clouds of liquid fuel exhaust into the already smog-throttled air. Yano watched them distastefully and wondered whether the UN had been too lenient – but the thought was snatched away by the civil compliance officer, his voice crackling over the cruiser’s closed comlink.
‘We’re approaching 15b now,’ he said, not turning around. Yano craned his neck to look and saw, framed in the dirty golden sky, a UN shuttle waiting in the centre of the platform. It was a sleek, fishlike craft, formed of little more than a pair of wings and twin plasma engines. Stencilled onto its sky-blue hull was a large black ‘UN’, with the Exigency Corps insignia next to it. Its pilot was standing next to it on the platform: a woman, his IHD informed him, who had once flown Valstar atmospheric destroyers in the Fleet Auxiliary.
The VCPD cruiser landed without ceremony, sirens and lights silenced at the flick of a switch. He unstrapped himself from his seat and stepped out onto the platform, suddenly sweating again now that he was back in the heavy, unmoving air. He thanked the crew of the cruiser and watched it for a short while as it pulled away from the platform in a crescendo of whirling rotors and soared among the ETF freighters like an insect flitting among elephants.
‘Special Envoy Yano,’ the woman said behind him. He whirled around and smiled disarmingly.
‘You must be Lia,’ he said, taking her hand.
‘Yes, sir,’ she replied, suppressing a smile. ‘I have orders to take you to the Blue Bolt post-haste.’
‘Then let’s get on with it, shall we?’ Yano replied, deciding that he wasn’t going to screw her on the flight up. It would have been easy enough, given time, but the journey to the voidbreaker was unlikely to take much more than thirty minutes with those plasma engines. To have any kind of chance in that time frame, she would either need to be intoxicated or he would have to use his Mindjack, and using the latter would be the end of him. Mindjack software could subconsciously alter the target’s mood by remotely hacking their IHD, but it was considered such a potent weapon that each use was logged and reviewed on the UNDC’s central diplomatic database.
She nodded curtly and climbed aboard, and he followed, appreciating her buttocks as they passed within a metre of his face. He took a seat by one of the few port holes, while she moved into the capsule at the front of the shuttle. Her role in the flight would be largely redundant, since the shuttle would literally fly itself. UN decrees following a series of highly publicised space disasters involving entirely autonomous ships, however, meant that all space-bound flights had to be overseen by a qualified pilot.
He sat back as she spoke to traffic control, and soon the gentle hum of the plasma engines filled the hold. The shuttle pulled smoothly away from the ground, and the smoggy air of Voga City turned to white cloud, then deep cerulean sky and finally a glittering black starfield within the space of a couple of minutes. As they exited the atmosphere, Yano felt himself pull away from the chair slightly, and he was overcome by the familiar and irritating feeling of weightlessness.
The journey was shorter than he had anticipated. For the most part he read an article from his IHD about the Pillars of Cain, a trio of gigantic, yellow-and-green gas clouds observable from the starboard side of the shuttle. A few times he tried to strike up a conversation with Lia, but she rebuffed him, apparently uninterested, as if she had been able to overhear his earlier thoughts. After that they both sat in silence, until Yano waved on the seat’s holo and activated a playlist of soothing music.
It was automatically cut off by an alarm sounding in the cockpit.
‘What’s that?’ he asked in an annoyingly worried tone.
The pilot donned a headset. ‘We’re approaching the exclusion zone,’ she said simply, and that was that.
For the next three minutes, the cockpit was alive with various alarms as they passed through the Blue Bolt’s three separate exclusion zones, concentric spheres of space that enabled one to be met with varying tiers of force depending on how close they came, unauthorised, to the voidbreaker. At each challenge, the pilot carefully read out a number of authorisation codes, but despite that Yano was still warned by his IHD that he had been hit by several waves of LRIS. By the time they were fully cleared to approach, they had passed into the third and final exclusion zone, which saw them liable to be spaced with zero warning. The voidbreaker would also have a suite of bioterminator drones, a host of autonomous robots whose only function was to hunt out spacesuit-clad survivors and, well, terminate them. The thought made him feel what was uncomfortably akin to terror.
