Reclamation (Book One of the Art of War Trilogy), page 43
A temperature warning, then, flashing on his visor and undoubtedly incurred by his entrance to the interior of the temple, was not what he had expected, and it was certainly nothing the unexotic interior could account for. Yet his Mantix sensor suites were not wrong: the atmosphere was fully ten degrees colder, and his breather units had had to up their heat-exchange to keep the filters scrubbed of ice. It did nothing to calm his pounding heart. He would have preferred to find the Zecad nothing more than an old relic, boring and lacklustre. Anything that added to the aura of mystery already surrounding it was deeply unwelcome.
He moved forward carefully and quietly, his eyes darting across the interior. The temple was formed of a circular, arched hallway, perhaps fifty metres across, with the floor consisting of a smooth, unembellished grey stone. The ceiling was festooned with old murals, which he had neither the time nor the inclination to try and decipher, and the walls were much the same, except those frescos appeared to be painted, albeit ancient, faded and barely discernible from the rock they covered.
Within five seconds his electronics went haywire. It happened suddenly and without warning. His comms were the first to go, then his railgun targeting suite, the latter followed swiftly by some of his more peripheral IHD systems. It was deeply irritating, though not mission critical. He stopped in an alcove for a brief second to run a comprehensive diagnostic, and, frustrated to find there was nothing tangibly wrong with any of his Mantix, flicked the iron sights up on his railgun and carried on.
After another five minutes, he cancelled his tac screen altogether. The interference from the temple was scrambling it to such an exasperating degree that it was more of a hindrance than anything else, and for the first time in years, he found himself operating outside of a training environment without an ocular sensor overlay. Unsettled, though undeterred, he continued to follow the curvature of the temple. Intermittent testing of his comlink revealed nothing but ghost chatter. A few times he tried to raise Fitzroy and Kene, or any UN or Xhevegan forces that had entered the temple, but to no avail.
The temple was virtually soundproof, though a long career of warfare told him that the distant basso rumbles which he could occasionally hear were explosions. He quickened his pace, hoping that their calculations on the longevity of their ordnance had been correct, then stopped. He could see something, only just visible round the curvature of the inner temple wall – something which long reliance on enhanced optics meant that even his perfect vision couldn’t make out fully. Peering into the gloom, he brought his railgun up and advanced slowly.
‘Shit,’ he said, once he realised. It was Kene. She was propped up awkwardly against the outer wall, railgun slung across her lap, though as he neared he saw that pinned would have been a more apt description. The guard and handle of a caldar jutted from her breastplate, telling him that it had been driven into her chest with some considerable force, though that in itself should not have been a problem for the medical suites of the Mantix. The mere presence of blood, seeping from the wound like crude oil from sand, alarmed him much more.
‘Kene,’ he breathed, coming to a stop next to her. He kept his railgun trained on the temple ahead for a few moments but could see nothing ahead.
‘Commander,’ she rasped, clearly in pain.
‘Christ, Kene, what’s going on with your IHD? Why are you bleeding?’
‘Gone,’ she sighed, her voice quiet and muffled without functioning Mantix speakers. It also sounded worryingly drowsy. He didn’t want to think how much blood was sloshing around inside her armour.
He looked over his right shoulder again, then popped open a box pocket on his utility belt. Inside were two syrettes filled with a cocktail of coagulants, painkillers and stimulants, and he plugged them into the intravenous lock in the gorget seal of her Mantix.
‘There… are provar…’ She struggled as the drugs worked their way into her jugular. ‘… concealed… hiding in the walls… I don’t know where… Fitz is.’
‘All right,’ Courte said, studying the sword protruding from her chest. ‘I don’t think I can take this out.’
Kene shook her head. ‘Just… leave me,’ she gasped. The strength of her voice was improving but to nothing like the level he wanted. ‘I’ll hold the fort here.’
He could just make out the barest hint of a smile through her visor.
Courte clenched his teeth and gripped her by the shoulder pad. ‘Listen, don’t you fucking die, all right? I’ll be back. Did you see Fitz at all?’
She shook her head, suppressing a cry of pain. ‘No,’ she managed, trying to shift her weight to take some of the pressure off the caldar. More blood seeped through the gap in her armour.
‘I’m going to get you a trauma unit–’
‘No!’ Kene gasped. ‘Go, you’re wasting time.’
Courte stood. He knew she was right. ‘I’m coming back. Just don’t fucking die.’
‘I’m… not planning on it,’ she said. He took one last look at her, then turned and ran down the hallway.
*
It was over. She had hoped that she might live to see her plan reach fruition, but that hope bled out of her now. It didn’t matter; the very last stage of the plot was complete. The presidential authorisation had been given. With any luck, Howarth’s EFFECT team would have already landed in the Forbidden City, setting the UN and the Ascendancy on an irrevocable path to full-scale total war. That was enough. It would have to be.
‘What’s going on?’ Frost managed. He was looking dumbly between the two of them, trying to decipher some meaning from the tense, strange atmosphere. Josette had made no plans beyond the presidential authorisation, and so in a flash of inspiration, she grabbed him by the throat.
‘Nothing,’ she grunted, spinning around him so that his body became a shield between her and the two guards Howarth had summoned.
‘Josette,’ Howarth said, rolling his eyes.
‘Drop the guns or I kill him,’ she said to the guards. It was more to buy time than anything else; even without the railguns, there were so many weapons secreted within their Mantix suits that it made little difference.
‘Josette, for Christ’s sake, it’s over, let him go,’ Howarth said, in a voice that was bordering on amusement.
‘Forget it,’ she snarled back. Frost’s face was turning a shade of claret as her hand slowly throttled him. ‘Drop the guns or he dies.’
‘Josette, why are you doing this?’ Howarth asked.
‘Shut up,’ she replied. The two guards were already splitting up. Keeping his weapon aimed directly at her head, one peeled away, moving around her as if tracing a circle she was at the centre of. She gripped Frost’s throat harder.
‘Call them off!’ she shouted, compensating for her rising panic with aggression. She could practically feel the railgun’s bead on the side of her face. She didn’t want to die at all, but if she had to, she’d damn well take a few of them with her.
‘Gnnrrr… Christ… Karl... hnnn… do as she… arcgggghh, says,’ Frost spluttered.
‘Why?’ Howarth retorted calmly to Frost. ‘You’re going to be deadweight in twenty seconds. We can revive you later.’
‘Not if I tear his throat out,’ Josette replied as Frost’s eyes bulged. A seam of blood opened from under her fingernails and trickled down Frost’s neck. ‘Call them off!’
Howarth allowed himself another five seconds of indecision before his face split into a sneer.
‘Fine. Stand down.’ He nodded to the guards. ‘But stay put,’ he added.
‘That wasn’t difficult,’ Josette said, feeling Frost’s legs begin to give way. She was running out of time. She studied the nearest guard. ‘Toss me that sidearm,’ she snapped at him, nodding to the rail pistol strapped to his hip.
‘We’re not giving you a weapon, Josette,’ Howarth said, practically laughing. ‘You have no options. The only thing you can hope for is to leave here in custody.’
He was right, of course. She still had the needleflex scrubber on her, but it was in her pocket and not in her hand where it needed to be. Without anything more than the threat of liberating Frost of his trachea, she really was in trouble, and Howarth was an industrious man. She had no doubt that the net was currently jammed up with IHD alarms emanating from his head.
Then a thought struck her.
‘Stay where you are,’ she said, wheeling the choking, spluttering Frost towards the toilet, doing so in such a way as to retain his services as a human shield.
‘Why, Josette?’ Howarth asked as she walked awkwardly away. ‘At least tell me that, before we kill you. I didn’t think you had it in you.’
‘That’s probably why it’s taken you so long to find out,’ she replied simply. She heeled the toilet door open, her hand still gripped firmly about Frost’s windpipe, and dragged him backwards inside.
‘Josette!’ exploded a familiar voice from behind her. ‘Why on Earth have I just got a message from Howarth telling me to detain you?’
Josette wheeled around to see Pike standing by the row of sinks, rail pistol in hand, a look of profound confusion etched across his formidable brow. The pistol was not pointed at her.
‘Oh, Gordon, thank God,’ she said. She gave Frost’s vocal cords a quick clench to render him dumb, then dropped him and ran towards Pike, crying. ‘He’s gone mad – he said he was going to kill me!’
Pike’s features creased further in bafflement as she wrapped her arms around him. Outside, she could hear Howarth shouting at them to come out through the door.
‘What on Earth is going on? Alistair?’ Pike said, awkwardly returning Josette’s embrace. She could have laughed then, at his stupidity. She brought both hands up in one swift motion, and leveraging her full bodyweight, twisted his thick, muscular bull neck until it snapped.
‘Josette!’ she heard Howarth shout again. ‘There’s no way out of there. Get out here now!’
She ignored him and picked up the rail pistol. It was coded to Pike’s IHD, but she was easily able to overcome its Death-of-Agent protocols with Mary’s EFFECT software suite. Frost was still writhing on the floor, clawing at his crushed and bleeding neck. She ignored him and began to kick open the toilet stalls one by one.
‘Ah shit, the goddamned President! Get in there!’ she heard Howarth suddenly start screaming as he realised – too late. The President was in the stall furthest from the door, sitting on the toilet seat and smelling like vomit. His eyes regarded her with a mixture of disbelief, mad fear and profound rage.
‘What are you doing?’ he asked stupidly, focussing on the pistol aimed squarely between his eyes.
‘Killing the UN,’ she said without a trace of remorse and shot him through the forehead.
‘Josette!’ she heard Howarth roar at a volume fit to burst his larynx. The net exploded with IHD warnings. The President’s death protocols were something quite aside from those of his relatively lowly Joint Chiefs, and comprehensive footage of his own murder – something which his corneal implants would have had no trouble in recording – would be beamed to hundreds of different sources arrayed across the galaxy.
She ducked out of the stall, her whole body trembling as adrenaline crashed through her system. The sheer enormity of what she had just done was incomprehensible. She could barely hold the pistol her hand was shaking so hard. She felt giddy and terrified all at the same time.
The outer toilet door splintered open from a well-placed, exo-powered kick, and a moment later, a trio of hollowpoint tungsten slugs tore through the inner door and chewed into the stall around her, centimetres from her centre mass. She yelped and fired back at the same time as trying to shield her body with her arms, and the resultant high angle of her pistol put all of her shots into the bunker wall above the door. A piercing shriek told her that she had, quite by chance, nicked open a high-pressure pipe running through the concrete.
‘Wait!’ she heard one of the guards shout to the other, but it was too late. The next slug to slam through the inner toilet door ignited the pipe’s spewing contents, and Josette watched, paralysed, as a mass of kaleidoscopic flame blossomed into life at the far end of the room.
The last thing she felt was fragments of bone from Frost’s body tearing into her like shrapnel, before the explosion claimed her.
*
By the time he reached the entrance to the Zecad proper, his IHD had ceased all but its most remedial functions. His exoskeleton was deadweight against his limbs, pulling on his Mantix like a corpse, and he had half a mind to switch his railgun to chemprop rounds in case the electromagnets jammed up as well. Everyone in UNAF, and especially EFFECT, had to undergo IHD-deprivation training, but he had never experienced such a profound system failure on operations. Considering this was likely to be the most important – if not last – mission he ever undertook, the timing could not have been worse.
The entrance to the Zecad was a wide, circular door, hewn into the black obsidian of the pyramid itself. Given what it represented, it was quite unremarkable: just a door, unadorned, glistening black. Beyond was a short tunnel, and after that, what looked to be a balcony of some description overlooking a wide, circular chamber. A low blue glow provided the only light.
He brought his railgun up and moved forward slowly into the chamber. He could hear movement now, voices, though not clearly. Swearing under his breath, he paused, removed his Mantix helmet and strapped it about his waist. There was a scream, cut short halfway through, as if someone had flipped a switch. He suppressed an urge to dash forward, and instead continued to prowl towards the edge of the balcony. When he got within a few metres of it, he crouched down and crawled to the lip.
The chamber was entirely black, like the outside of the pyramid, and towered above him, a conical hollow which had been carved out of the Zecad and which travelled all the way to its peak. Below, no more than fifteen metres down, was a wide, circular floor space. At its centre sat some kind of holo generator, and above it, a blue orb, not unlike a tac screen, displaying a graphic of two galaxies separated by a huge void. He was no astrographer, but he knew the Khāli Barrier when he saw it – the vast, unnavigable space surrounding the Milky Way.
His attention, however, was not fixed on that, but was rather directed at the headless bodies of three of his men as they lay spasming and jerking on the floor, long, glossy streams of crimson ejecting from their neck stumps in great pulsing gouts. At least one other EFFECT agent and two Xhevegans had also been killed, shot in what was, judging by the still-smoking slug holes torn into the obsidian walls, quite a recent firefight. The rest were lined up on the floor, face down, with four Folhourtian monks standing over them.
He checked the anger which quickly threatened to impair his judgement and scanned the rest of the chamber, keeping in mind what Kene had told him. There were no obvious hiding places that he could see from his vantage point, inside the walls or otherwise, but it took a significant advantage to overwhelm nine EFFECT agents. There had to have been something.
He considered his options. The provari monks were not armoured – indeed, he could see that one of them was wounded – his men were not bound and he had the key elements of surprise and superior elevation. Against that, the provar were armed with ranged weapons, he was relying on iron sights and they knew the full layout of a building which likely included a network of concealed tunnels.
He brought his railgun up. The choice was clear. Shoot now and salvage some warm bodies; better that than return to the entrance, secure reinforcements and return to collect nine cold ones. He lined up the sights on the nearest provar and fired.
The railgun made an appalling amount of noise inside the Zecad. The shape of the structure positively amplified the sound, though it had the welcome benefit of inflating the apparent number of shooters. The first rounds hit home, blowing the intended provar’s chest cavity to pieces and killing it outright. His volley on the next monk hit a glancing blow, destroying a calf muscle and causing the provar to stagger to an alcove he had not seen at the far end of the chamber. The rest of his shots went wide, a combination of the bucking railgun and the fast-moving targets. The latter pair of survivors egressed through a concealed door and vanished.
Courte leapt to his feet and, keeping his railgun trained on the floor below, moved down the wide staircase that spiralled to the floor of the chamber.
‘Commander!’ Fitzroy shouted, recovering his weapon from the pile. His face bore a large gash across the right eyebrow, though he looked otherwise unhurt. ‘Thank God.’
‘What the fuck happened here?’ Courte snarled, keeping his railgun trained on where he had seen the provar go – or at least, approximately where. There wasn’t even the barest hint of a door.
‘We lost all electronics,’ Fitzroy grunted, checking over the dead. Siun appeared next to him, an angry red mark around his alabaster neck where he had been mistreated. His Xhevegan-tailored Mantix was intact, though there was no sign of his helmet.
‘Ambushed,’ the Xhevegan growled. ‘The Zecad must be filled with secret passageways. They were all over us before we even knew what was happening.’
Courte sucked his teeth, surveying the scene. Four dead men, two Xhevegans. No comms, no electronics and a highly mobile and determined enemy.
‘I am concerned,’ he said, his attention now turning to the vast, static sphere taking up much of the floor space, ‘that they are firing in here. They are not supposed to be firing in here. This is supposed to be…’ He frowned, searching for the words. ‘… a fucking holy relic.’
‘It is a map,’ Siun remarked. The alien raised a hand, tracing through the air the pattern of wormholes. ‘A map of the safe passages across the Khāli Barrier. Their crusade fleet lines. It isn’t a relic; it’s a strategic display.’
‘How old is it?’
‘It must be hundreds of years,’ Siun said. ‘I am not sure....’
