Reclamation (Book One of the Art of War Trilogy), page 42
*
A late afternoon appearance from Sophia’s sun gave the atmosphere a warm, leaden feel as they trudged through the soft soil and ferns and back towards the space plane. Vondur, morose and in no mood to join the sporadic conversation of his companions, instead traced Sophia’s unnamed moon through gaps in the piles of cumulonimbus, an ethereal and brilliant white orb stark against the claret hue of the sky. Around him, at a spread of about fifty metres, the rest of the party moved through the forest, though with considerably more purpose. Indeed, he was in danger of falling behind.
ZEN had been tasked by Halder with carrying the vacuum-sealed corpse of Iyadi, much to Vondur’s chagrin. The VI walked at the front of the column next to Cole, who had taken point, insofar as point was required on an empty planet. Halder strode behind them, engrossed in his IHD, and Takach was behind him, his Mantix exoskeleton easily handling the additional inconvenience of Lyra’s armoured holdall.
Vondur had not spoken to Lyra since Iyadi’s death. He was no lover of the kaygryn – nor any one particular alien race for that matter – and like most UN citizens, his feelings on other Tier-Three species ranged from indifference to media-influenced dislike. He was certainly surrounded by more interspecies racism than most, on account of his being a serving member of UNAF, but that had never really been his way.
No, he was no lover of the kaygryn, but he was no lover of the lazy hedonism of the UN way of life either, and he certainly considered the clandestine, above-the-law activities of EFFECT and UNIS to be staggeringly hypocritical. The sadistic torture and murder of another living being, even given Iyadi’s crimes and even in these times of impending war, just felt so… appalling. It was shameful that it had taken such extreme circumstances to cure him of his apathy, but he was certainly not going to help Halder abduct and torture another alien, whatever they knew or had done.
He fidgeted with his Mantix helmet strapped about his waist and finally, after a few minutes of reflection, placed it on his head and opened a private channel to the EFFECT commander.
‘What is it, Captain? I’m busy,’ Halder said before Vondur could even open his mouth.
‘What are we doing, Commander?’ Vondur asked, swallowing back his anger. He had meant it philosophically, but it was in the most literal sense that Halder took it.
‘Awaiting orders,’ he growled. His conversation with ‘Johnson’ – presumably the man’s commanding officer – had taken up the best part of half an hour, each transmission encrypted, packaged, sent to orbit and then bounced off the voidbreaker’s FTL comms array to wherever it was Johnson existed. It was probably now up to Johnson to speak to her superior officers before they broke orbit. Vondur knew the system well enough to know they were about to do a lot of waiting.
‘I will not help you abduct anyone else,’ Vondur said. Ahead, Halder didn’t even break his stride.
‘You’re right, you won’t,’ he replied. ‘From this point onwards, Captain, you’re nothing but an oxygen sink. We’ll be dumping you on the next UN world we hit, along with Miss Staerck and Iyadi’s corpse.’
Vondur’s fists clenched within the suit. He was about to snarl his riposte when a loud bang distracted him. The party stopped immediately, railguns aimed at the sky. Comms discipline, which thus far had been sacrosanct, went out the window.
‘That was a sonic boom.’
‘Orbit’s gone dark.’
‘I can’t raise the ’breaker.’
‘Something’s approaching.’
‘What is that?’
‘Up there, two o’clock!’
Vondur looked up, only vaguely aware of the chatter.
‘ZEN?’ he asked over a private channel.
‘Yes, Captain?’
‘What is that?’
ZEN took a few seconds to respond. ‘I’m not sure, Captain. It is a ship, though it is not a type I recognise.’
Vondur frowned. He could hear its thrusters unaided, though the intermittent cloud cover was still obscuring the source of the noise.
‘Provar?’ Lyra asked over an open channel. ‘Could we have been followed?’
‘Quiet,’ Halder snapped.
The ship breached the cloud level less than ten kilometres away. Vondur’s enhanced optics immediately locked on, describing a shining, featureless, silver cone tipped on its side. Behind it stretched a long plume of white exhaust, languorously dissipating in the warm air.
‘Orders, Commander?’ one of the EFFECT men asked Halder.
‘Stay still, and shut up,’ Halder replied.
Vondur couldn’t argue with that. The ship was of a pattern and class he had never seen before in his life, and he was as well versed in the machinery of modern warfare as they came. Trying to avoid it would have been pointless. Whoever was piloting it was clearly aware of their presence – the fact that it was making a beeline for them was testament to that.
His heart thumped in his chest, and he began to sweat inside the Mantix suit quite irrespective of its nanofibre weave. The vessel was barely two kilometres away now and visibly decelerating. Even its engines made a strange, unfamiliar sound.
‘Where is it going to land?’ Lyra asked. It was a valid question. The forest surrounding them was dense. There were very few places a space-going vessel could land safely without causing fatal damage to its superstructure.
The question was answered swiftly. A stunningly bright beam of phase fire emanated from the alien vessel and connected with their space plane in the clearing ahead, obliterating it in an instant and blasting a maelstrom of shrapnel-like bark through the forest and into the EFFECT team. Vondur’s vision was flooded with External Conditions Hostile warnings as the overpressure crashed into him, causing his Mantix to harden to better allow the nanogel to distribute the force of the explosion. Judging by the pressure readings, an unprotected human would have had their insides liquefied.
‘… Shit,’ Halder allowed after the blast wave had passed and the shrieking crack of the phase cannon had echoed its last. The craft hovered above the scene of destruction, its powerful down-jets blasting the remaining debris out of the way and extinguishing the infant flames.
‘ZEN… tell me you know what that is,’ Vondur murmured, transfixed.
‘I’m afraid I still do not, Captain. I cannot find records of this design or specification on any of my databases. There are no FTL comms arrays in orbit, either. I could have used one to widen the search.’
The clearing ahead filled with a hissing whine as the craft descended vertically. From the thick end, a trio of curved limbs sprouted free of the hull, cushioning it as it came to a graceful stop over the smouldering ruins of the space plane.
‘All right,’ Halder said over the comlink warily. ‘Lower your weapons, but keep them ready. Whoever this is, they’re our only ticket off this rock. We’re either going to hitch a ride or kill them for it.’
It was a thought that hadn’t yet occurred to Vondur, such was his preoccupation with the ship. With the apparent loss of the voidbreaker, and now the space plane, they truly were adrift on Sophia – a planet which had been one of the UN’s best kept secrets for over a century. The realisation of just how isolated they had become overcame him like a wave of vertigo.
They moved up slowly, all of them edging closer to the boundary of the clearing so that, when they all eventually came to a stop, they were more or less in a line. Halder stood at the front with Takach, ZEN and Cole next to him. Vondur took Lyra’s head and stood behind. Next to him, Iyadi’s bagged corpse lay on a pile of charred ferns.
‘Nobody do or say anything unless I tell them to,’ Halder snapped. Vondur had to hand it to the man: he was calm under pressure. His own heart was fit to burst.
They waited, standing in front of the vessel like their ancestors during First Contact. Vondur toggled through the squad’s bio-monitors to see elevated heart rates in all three EFFECT agents. His own IHD was struggling to keep his body sweat free, and the inner layer of the Mantix suit was slowly soaking through, making it itchy and uncomfortable despite being designed to entirely resist both conditions.
All of them except ZEN flinched as the perfectly smooth skin of the vessel hissed, and a vertical rectangle of hull recessed into the hold. Vondur could just make out the dull blue glow of holo panels inside before a ramp perhaps two metres in length slid out from the base of this new door and nestled snugly among the charred, blasted earth.
‘All right everybody, stay sharp,’ Halder murmured. Vondur’s fingers itched for the massive, weapon-packed gauntlets of a Goliath over the comparatively poxy gloves of the Mantix. Even a railgun would have been better than nothing. Instead, he stood uselessly by Iyadi’s corpse, hoping against hope that this didn’t turn into a shooting match.
Something stirred in the doorway. His audio sensors picked up brief signatures of vocal sound emanating from inside the vessel’s hold, but before he had time to try and decipher what it was, a pair of figures appeared on the ramp.
‘Jesus Christ,’ Vondur managed.
‘Kaygryn?’ Lyra said, her voice thick with astonishment. Similar sentiments echoed from the EFFECT men, cluttering the shared bandwidth. Only ZEN remained impassive, instead proceeding to quietly gather information.
The pair on the ramp certainly appeared to be kaygryn of some description, though to Vondur they were a far cry from those crammed aboard the holding areas of Navem Sigma. Instead of the poor, unkempt and often foul-smelling aliens he was used to, these were remarkably well equipped. Each wore a thick yellow sarong trimmed with turquoise and a white cuirass of interlocking armour plates not unlike those of a Mantix suit. The weapons they carried, totally unclassifiable according to both ZEN and his sensor suite, looked like two-metre halberds.
‘Sweet Christ,’ Cole said. ‘Look at the arms.’
It was true. Instead of a second pair of vestigial appendages, like all other kaygryn, each bore two pairs of fully-formed arms.
‘Shut it,’ Halder snapped. ‘ZEN, what’s going on? Are these kaygryn?’
‘They are,’ ZEN replied. ‘Their genome is identical. Phenotypically, of course, they are different, but as a species, they are exactly the same as the kaygryn from Vos’Shan.’
‘You mean they’re biologically the same, just… better?’
‘In a manner of speaking,’ ZEN replied.
One of the kaygryn snarled at them and lowered its halberd, and Vondur could see that as well as being a bladed weapon – with a likely monofilament edge – there was also the tell-tale prism of a quad-powered laser at the crown of the staff.
‘That’s a ranged weapon,’ he said over the wideband. ‘It can–’
‘Thank you, Captain, we all have Mantix – and eyes,’ Halder added. ‘It’s what the fuck they want that worries me.’
He didn’t have to wait long to find out. The first beam of light to emanate from one of the laser-halberds cut Halder’s railgun in half. As soon as Cole and Takach attempted to return fire, their railguns – along with, unfortunately for them, their bodies – were correspondingly bisected.
‘Gah – fuck!’ Halder shouted as the two EFFECT men peeled apart from nose to groin in a gory mess even the advanced medical abilities of the Mantix suits couldn’t salvage. Vondur, who was at this point lying face down in the engine-roasted soil, looked up only when Lyra began to make odd jabbering noises, to see that they were two men down and the kaygryn, if they could so be called, were one man up. The new addition was a head taller than his bodyguards, though the disparity was in large part made up by his headdress. Where the others wore sarongs and body armour, he wore a full toga of pearl and turquoise. His fingers and ears were covered in gem-encrusted rings of gold and silver, and his short fur was an altogether glossier chestnut brown. In fact, the only equipment the three of them shared seemed to be an ocular display, a four-centimetre rectangle of blue holo emanating from a band around the forehead. It was through this that he regarded Vondur, an unmistakeable look of disdain written across his features.
‘ZEN…?’ Vondur said when Halder didn’t move. ‘Tell it in Argish that we aren’t a threat to it.’
‘I know you aren’t,’ the new kaygryn replied, in quite impeccable Terran. ‘My men have just destroyed all of your weapons – or at the very least, your resolve to use them. That you aren’t a threat to me is painfully evident. I am sorry to say,’ he added.
Vondur almost flinched at the alien’s perfect enunciation of Terran. Such flawless diction was reserved almost entirely for alien diplomats – and even then, it was rarely perfect.
‘Who are you?’ Halder asked. The fight had left the commander. Unarmed and de-manned, he was just another stranded human a long, long way from the UN.
‘I am Executor Ghesovius Hasani, nine hundredth Fleetmaster of the Kaygryn Empire and Third Member of the Conclave Militant to His Most Excellent and Divine Majesty, Emperor Vun’Daal XI.’ It was well said and evidently well received by the kaygryn’s two guards, if their brandishing and growling was anything to go by.
Vondur cleared his throat. Despite the impressive lethality of the vessel, the laser-halberds and indeed, the outward appearance of the three kaygryn, even he knew that there was no Kaygryn Empire.
‘Where did you say you were from?’ he asked as inoffensively as he could.
‘The Kaygryn Empire,’ Hasani replied with exactly the same conviction – perhaps even ferocity – as before.
‘What is he talking about?’ Lyra asked him over a secure channel. ‘Does he mean the Kaygryn Federacy?’
Vondur grimaced. There was little about the situation he liked – especially the four smoking halves of the EFFECT men – but he knew that the one sure-fire way to make it worse was to anger Hasani. Denying the existence of an Empire which the kaygryn seemed rather proud of seemed like a good way to go about it.
‘What do you want from us?’ Vondur asked.
‘Commander Iyadi,’ Hasani said, in what was fast becoming a trademark candour. ‘I know you have him. What I do not know is where he is. I hope, for your sake, that he is not the corpse in that bag next to you.’
Vondur did not doubt that, given these kaygryn’s surpassing level of technology, Hasani knew that the corpse in the bag was indeed Iyadi.
‘We don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Halder growled. Vondur winced.
‘Hmm,’ Hasani replied. Something rippled across the ocular display of the leftmost kaygryn guard, and in the space of two seconds it had lowered its laser-halberd and swiftly killed Halder. Vondur turned away as his gorge rose, though not quickly enough to avoid seeing the two halves of the EFFECT commander crumpling to the floor like the sides of a butchered pig.
‘Oh God,’ Vondur half-shouted, spitting away the last of his vomit-slicked saliva.
‘You are fast running out of friends,’ Hasani remarked to Vondur.
‘Commander Iyadi is dead,’ Vondur said, doubtful that this was an exercise he was going to survive. ‘He was tortured and murdered by the three men you have just killed.’
Something akin to a smirk played across Hasani’s lips. ‘Of course, it would be prudent for a man in your situation to blame these three corpses for Commander Iyadi’s demise, would it not? They are not about to contradict you.’
Vondur grimaced. ‘What does it matter? You are going to kill me anyway.’
Hasani snorted. ‘You may be right. What is your name, human?’
‘I am Captain Ben Vondur. This is Special Agent Lyra Staerck.’
‘Ah yes, the head in the box. We were most amused when our long-range scanners picked up on that little treasure. Tell me, Miss Head-In-The-Box, who is responsible for the death of Commander Iyadi?’
‘Like the Captain said, it was these three men. They tortured and killed him for information,’ Lyra said, via ZEN’s chest-speakers.
‘Remarkable,’ Hasani said. ‘And what information were they trying to glean from poor Commander Iyadi?’
‘Why he was trying to engineer a war between the UN and the provar.’
That seemed to throw Hasani, albeit briefly, judging by the way his eyes widened. ‘Impressive,’ the kaygryn said. ‘Perhaps you know then why I am here.’
Vondur shook his head. ‘I’ve never even heard of the Kaygryn Empire.’
‘And why would you have?’ Hasani snapped. ‘We have been existing under the boot heel of provari crusade fleets for centuries.’ He waved his hand dismissively. ‘But all that is about to change. It was sad that Commander Iyadi had to die; I would have liked to have seen him at least one more time, to congratulate him on all of his fine work. Alas, I cannot delay.’
Hasani growled something to the two guards, who moved forward to collect the body of Iyadi. They dragged it unceremoniously through the blasted undergrowth, up the ramp and back on to the shuttle.
‘I don’t understand,’ Vondur shouted after them. ‘What is the Kaygryn Empire? I don’t understand!’
‘Nor, I fear, shall you ever. Goodbye, Captain Ben Vondur. I doubt our paths will cross again.’
Hasani turned on his heel and strode back into the hold of the ship.
‘Wait!’ Vondur shouted, but Hasani did not. Instead, the ship retracted its landing gear and launched. Within thirty seconds, the only sign of it having ever visited Sophia was a pair of slowly dissipating contrails in the evening sky.
‘Shit,’ Vondur breathed, staring at the clouds above. ‘Now what?’
ZECAD
‘Hadan’s Reach is the worst thing we have ever done as the human race. Our collective responsibility is beyond question.’
Michael Constance, Federal Socialist Xeno Affairs Minister
The turbulent atmosphere of Folhourt had never been a forgiving one. On a good day, most of the populated continents could expect blustery weather and overcast skies. On a more typical day, the tumultuous climate could produce anything from freezing fog to the Ecriotha Rac – a scouring, hundred-kilometre ice storm strong enough to flay the skin. They had been warned to expect either when operating in and around the Forbidden City, though Courte had thus far avoided both.
