Reclamation (Book One of the Art of War Trilogy), page 41
‘Your kaygryn activism during university, presumably, did not go unnoticed by UNIS?’ David asked.
Haig shook his head. ‘Of course not. They said I was talented enough to let it slide though and put me on a five-year probationary period.’
David nodded his agreement. ‘You were. A first-rate data analyst and intelligence officer. Tell me, at what point did your activism resume?’
‘In almost every respect it never ended,’ Haig said. ‘Once I was on the inside, it became frighteningly easy to subvert UNIS systems. Most of the software in the Outer Ring is woeful, and the Vadian Spiral is no different.’
‘It’s something we’re aware of,’ David replied. ‘As much as we’d like to be, we can’t be everywhere at once.’
‘You should be worried. I was not the only one doing this stuff.’
‘Like I said, we’re aware of it,’ David said. ‘Tell me about your activism.’
Haig rubbed one of his eyes. ‘Well, obviously I was too young to remember Hadan’s Reach directly.’
‘By about fifteen years,’ David observed.
‘When I was at Gesscert, it was still hugely contentious. The massacre at Beng’Tusk happened in my late teens. Three hundred thousand kaygryn slave workers killed by the provar on Vonvalt, just for refusing to resettle offworld. I remember coming across the pictures on the public net. Piles of corpses, rotting in the summer heat. The men had had their genitals cut off and the women had been raped by the thousand.’
‘Vonvalt had been ceded to the provar fifteen months before,’ David remarked, as if idly flicking through a short history of the UN.
‘For four million tonnes of EXM.’ Haig’s lip curled in distaste. ‘We gave them Beng’Tusk knowing that they would enslave the kaygryn there. Knowing that they would be massacred. We knew and we still sold it.’
‘IHDs, nanotechnology, FTL drives... All of them depend on EXM, in one form or another. The provar had it; we did not. The undersecretary at the time seemed to think it was a good deal.’
‘Did he still think that after the massacre?’
‘The Clemens Inquiry found Executor Iourix guilty of war crimes on Gonvarion. He was hanged with the Ascendancy’s blessing.’
Haig rolled his eyes. ‘And what was that, exactly? Justice?’
David clasped his hands on the table. ‘Some would call it that.’
‘I call it horseshit,’ Haig spat, staring daggers into the other man’s face. The old fire was back in him again, girding his soul. Recounting was making him remember why he did what he had done in the first place.
David made a placatory gesture, spreading his palms and leaning back. ‘I only said some would call it justice. Would you have had us kill three hundred thousand provar in retaliation? We are supposed to be above such things, as a society.’
‘I would have killed three hundred thousand provar, then I would have killed three hundred thousand humans,’ Haig said, practically snarling. ‘Then we would have been some way towards justice.’
They sat in silence for a moment while David contemplated his answer. ‘All right,’ he said, after a short while. ‘So you protested at university. You and many thousands more across the galaxy. What happened next? When did you step up to activism?’
‘I met someone called Dominique during my third year. I had seen her around at rallies and protests. We both recognised each other, though we had never really spoken. She approached me one evening in a café on the outskirts of Gesscert City and asked me if I wanted to ‘take it to the next level’.’
‘Go on.’
‘I said I did. She introduced me to the underground movement. At the time I think we were called Kala-Amore. Just a bunch of students writing pamphlets for the public net and distributing them to every IHD connected to the system. This was back when the firewalls were manual and not AI-controlled. That was when I really got into software hacking, during that last year. We talked about sabotaging EXM freighters and other nonsense but never really did anything about it.’
‘Dominique was working for UNIS,’ David said. If he was consulting his IHD for any of this information, he was concealing it very well.
‘Yes,’ Haig said bitterly. ‘She shopped all of us. I don’t know how long she had been a plant. I think that was part of the reason I wanted to joint UNIS: to be able to avoid that kind of thing.’
‘Was it your experience with the Gesscertic Metropolitan Police that radicalised you?’
Haig snorted. ‘I wouldn’t say radicalised. Their Special Branch knocked me around a bit. I didn’t even know at the time they were working with UNIS, that’s how naive I was. They decided I was not a threat and tossed me back into university. I played it straight after that and applied for UNIS’s graduate programme. And had a very similar conversation to this, funnily enough.’
David smiled his warm smile. ‘Okay. Let’s fast forward a few years. I want you to take me back to the earliest point at which you began planning this current catastrophe.’
Haig thought for a brief moment, too involved in his own life’s story to notice the barb. ‘It was a few years after I was posted to the Anternis Mission Station. A total backwater, though less so than it is now. At that point I think I was the only man there, tracking some wanted tax-dodgers and acting as a bounce station for the deep space relay watching Crusade Fleet Sixteen. It was very boring. Forty per cent human redundant. So I started monitoring kaygryn military traffic, illegally. Something to pass the time.’
‘When was this?’
‘Would have been... almost exactly eight years ago.’
‘And what did you discover?’
Haig took a deep breath. ‘I discovered that the kaygryn had been hiding a vessel on one of the islands in the Bayscillic Ocean, about seven thousand kilometres south of Vos’Shan.’
David frowned for a brief second. ‘Clairvoyant tells me your adrenaline levels have just about skyrocketed.’
It was true. Haig’s heart was thumping in his chest, despite the EFFECT software attempting to force his body to feel calm.
‘You’re not lying to me, are you?’ David asked, his features darkening.
Haig shook his head emphatically. His mouth suddenly felt very dry. ‘No, I promise you...’
‘What was the ship? We already know about the clippers you kept there to attack the crusade fleet.’
Haig’s eyes widened. Iyadi must have told them. ‘This was before, years before. Before UNIS came sniffing around and put a mission station in the Tiberean Mountains.’
‘So? What was it?’ David asked. He was getting impatient.
‘It was a kaygryn ship,’ Haig said, feeling his fingers tremble. He felt sick. To have kept the secret for so long, unburdening felt simultaneously like insane relief and profound treachery. ‘It was a kaygryn ship, but... but...’
‘Yes?’ David said.
Haig cleared his throat. ‘It was not from this galaxy.’
David remained remarkably impassive as he processed this information. ‘What do you mean, not from this galaxy?’
‘The kaygryn ship was not from this galaxy,’ Haig said, on the verge of tears. Betrayal, as it turned out, was a miserable feeling.
‘Well? Where was it from?’
‘... Messier 31.’
‘Andromeda?’
Haig blinked back tears. He nodded.
‘And how exactly did it cross the Khāli Barrier?’ David’s eyes suddenly widened. His façade cracked. ‘Christ – the crusade fleets. You know what they’re doing.’
It was too much for Haig. In one clumsy motion he sprang to his feet and ran. The gravelly beach crunched beneath his pistoning legs and the wind roared in his ears for all of three seconds; then the air turned to syrup.
‘Karris, don’t be ridiculous,’ David said from immediately behind him. Haig slowly turned, clawing his way through the viscous air, to see the chairs and table and EFFECT agent were, impossibly, barely a metre away. His heart sank so violently that for a second he thought he would have another stress-induced heart attack.
‘This is a computer program,’ David said. ‘Sit down and stop it. Remember what I said about co-operating.’
Haig did as he was told. The chair felt real enough beneath his buttocks, but any last vestiges of his spirit were utterly extinguished.
‘Tell me what you know,’ David said reasonably. For the first time in the entire interrogation, Haig caught a flicker of IHD usage in the man’s eye. Others were listening. He imagined a group of EFFECT officers sitting round a table in VR sync, watching a holo of the interview with bated breath.
‘The kaygryn are not from this galaxy. Neither are the provar.’
David sat back in his chair. He took a long look at Haig. ‘Clairvoyant is never wrong,’ he said after a while.
‘Then Clairvoyant knows I’m telling the truth.’
Another pause. ‘All right. Go on.’
Haig wiped his eyes. ‘I reached out to the kaygryn on Vos’Shan. Specifically Commander Iyadi. It took me almost a year to gain his trust. I had to give him a lot of good UN intelligence and equipment for him to bring me into the inner circle.’
‘Ventu, Havé, Iyadi, Lok, Oné and Bega. The Vos’Shan’i militia commanders. Your “inner circle”.’
‘They were more than that. They were my friends. Like the kaygryn you murdered on Phaetonis, by the way.’
David shrugged. ‘Keep going.’
Haig swallowed back his anger. ‘They told me that they had been visited by a kaygryn from another galaxy. They told me that this kaygryn was different to them, that he was highly intelligent and that he possessed technology that surpassed even that of the UN.’ His eyes were glued to the table as he spoke. ‘They told me that he even looked slightly different. He stood taller than them, and that his vestigial arms weren’t, well, vestigial. I remember them being very earnest and excited, like children.’
David said nothing.
‘So… being a professional cynic, I told them I had to see this new kaygryn for myself. Since I was the only UNIS man there at the time, it was not difficult for me to manipulate the civil aviation VI and completely erase all traces of our flight from the system. I took Iyadi and Oné with me, and they directed me to the island.’
He waited once more for David to say something, but the man remained completely impassive. Perhaps enthralled would have been a better description.
‘Well, sure enough, he was there.’
‘What was his name?’ David asked quickly.
Haig clenched his teeth. ‘Executor Hasani.’
‘Executor Hasani?’
‘That’s the name and rank he gave.’ Haig knew they would already be running a trace program on any kaygryn by the name of Hasani.
‘Hasani sounds like a provari name,’ David remarked. ‘Executor is certainly a provari rank.’
‘It is a rank in the Kaygryn Empire as well,’ Haig snapped.
David’s expression was unreadable. After a while, he said, ‘Perhaps you’d best tell me what Hasani told you.’
*
They tried to catch up with Scarcroft, but he was already gone, untraceable on Vargonroth’s Civil Aviation VI. Josette squinted up into the cloudless blue sky, as if she might be able to see the fleet marshal’s ship through unaided sight alone, but instead merely found herself staring at the traffic as it shuttled up and down the enormous pylons. The evening air was still warm, despite Vargonroth’s prevailing climate, and she felt almost calm standing in the sun, letting the warmth of it soak into her skin.
Frost irritatingly broke her reverie. ‘We should find Howarth,’ he said, slightly out of breath. Instead of the cool, decisive tone she was used to, the man sounded plaintive and pathetic. She rounded on him.
‘He’s back inside, if his locator’s anything to go on,’ she said, annoyed. Frost nodded slightly, hesitated, and then when it was clear she wasn’t going to follow him in, headed obligingly back into Halo Arch.
Josette cast her face back up to the sky, closing her eyes. She knew she would probably die soon, though thanks to IHDs, death had become a much less frightening prospect than it had been for her ancestors. The simple flick of a mental switch could turn a violent, painful expiry into a blissful, pain-free drift into unconsciousness, and knowing that made it much easier to accept. It did not, however, mean that she craved it. She would miss her revolution, for one.
She toyed briefly with the idea of going into exile, of finding some nothing world in the Outer Ring and living out her life on a tiny island, free of the terrible burden of responsibility, but a large burst of thrust from one of the nearer Fleet ships snapped her from her daydream. She found her resolve no weaker. She had entertained the same doubts in the wake of Mary Johnson’s death, and yet here she was. It was difficult to break the habit of a lifetime, after all.
With a sigh, she turned back into the building, shouldered her way past a pair of idling security guards and walked back into the elevator to the President’s bunker. White-clad clean-up crews for Garrick’s lightly smoking corpse were already present, scraping the brains off the floor with a plastic edge. They deposited the gory remnants into white, ovoid shells, which were set into a crate in an arrangement which looked like eggs in a carton. It was a gruesome sight, but no worse than the many hundreds of hours of UN drone surveillance she’d seen of kaygryn being slaughtered in provari death camps.
She caught up with Frost, who was standing at the end of the table with Howarth. They had been talking quietly but stopped on her approach. The President was nowhere to be seen.
‘Where’s the President?’ she asked.
‘In the toilet,’ Frost said.
‘Still?’
‘Still.’
‘What’s going on?’ she asked.
‘What do you mean, what’s going on?’ Howarth said tiredly. ‘You watched him vomit.’
‘No, I meant with the order. The Xhevegan contingency.’ She tried not to sound too enthusiastic. ‘Have you given the order?’
Howarth looked at her. ‘Yes,’ he said after a while. He regarded her for a long moment. ‘It should reach them within about thirty minutes.’
Josette nodded slowly, wearing a look of sombre concentration. ‘Let’s hope that that intel pays off then,’ she said, more to Frost than Howarth. Her voice was giving her away. She was giddy with excitement.
‘The intelligence is sound,’ Howarth practically snapped, irritated on Frost’s behalf. ‘It’s the only thing in this entire mess that we can rely on.’ He looked away, focussing on the distant bunker wall. ‘I just hope our men don’t get shredded in orbit.’
‘Hmm,’ Josette replied. Despite being one of the architects of the latter stages of the Xhevegan contingency, even she had not been privy to the Xhevegan intelligence sources on which Frost and Howarth had relied – though it was easy to simply dismiss them as revenge-driven obsessives. They would have said anything, after all, to garner UN support for their vendetta against Folhourt. In the end, it mattered little whether they were telling the truth or not. The crusade fleets were already stopping. An abortive attempt to capture the provar’s holiest relic was more likely to bond the entire Ascendancy in rage than to pave the way for a bloody coup by a pro-UN faction.
She had to stop herself from reacting as Mary Johnson’s IHD received a message from Howarth.
I think you might have been right about Josette. I don’t trust her. Let me know when you are coming to fleet command.
She read it and dismissed it, feeling suddenly light-headed. It was one thing to jump at shadows, to read too far into comments, to treat meaningless glances as direct suspicion; it was quite another to have it all confirmed in writing in front of her face. Fortunately, Howarth wasn’t looking directly at her. If he had been, he would have noticed a tremor pass across her face as she tried desperately to suppress the whirlwind of thoughts now clouding her judgement.
She cycled back through Mary’s IHD messages. There had been no others, nothing telling her of the authorisation of the attack on the Zecad. A cold, cloying fear constricted her throat. Had she even killed Mary? Or had she just murdered some doppelgänger, some decoy set up by Howarth to entrap her? Or did Mary have some second IHD, some backup which contained all of Howarth’s newer messages, unread and unanswered because Mary was actually now a corpse in a sprite suit?
Josette sat down at the table, pretending to be bored. It crossed her mind then that if Howarth suspected her, he might easily have lied about the authorisation of the mission to the Zecad. In which case, she was quickly running out of time.
She needed to make a decision, fast. She ran through the closing aspects of the plan, considering all the possibilities, deciding whether Howarth was needed alive in any of them. Once she was satisfied that he wasn’t, she was resolved. She would not take the chance that he was telling the truth. She would use the needleflex scrubber on Howarth and authorise the mission herself from his IHD.
‘Karl, can I have a word with you in private?’ she said, keeping her voice admirably level. Was it her imagination or did the hint of a smile cross the man’s face?
She turned as the door opened to see two Mantix-clad guards walking directly towards her.
‘Yes, of course,’ Howarth said, and this time he did smile, broadly. ‘I think it would be best if we had a chat in private. A long chat.’
