Reclamation (Book One of the Art of War Trilogy), page 5
They docked without incident, however, and Yano was quickly waved through the airlock and the shuttle’s docking proboscis. He was met by a pair of marines, both clad in full Mantix pressure suits and armed with a pair of hull-friendly, flechette-loaded railguns. They knew Yano wasn’t armed from the intensive LRIS carried out by the Blue Bolt, but he supposed they might still have to kill him.
‘Welcome aboard, Special Envoy,’ one of them said. His IHD tag identified him as Lieutenant Sykes. He proffered a hand, and Yano took it. He was pulled through the open airlock, and the other marine closed it behind him and sealed it.
The voidbreaker was the smallest craft in the Fleet after the clipper, and designed for lengthy, deep space patrols. As a result, there were only two life-support modules: the smaller one he was currently in, which held the two marines’ quarters, the armoury and a host of boarding equipment; and the second, slightly larger module, which held the command centre, the captain’s private quarters and the remainder of the crews’ sleep capsules. All of it was crammed inside a grey hull the shape of a whale’s head, meaning there was little space for anyone other than the five crewmembers – and that number included the two marines.
Yano tried to hide his disdain as he looked around him. Every conceivable space was stuffed full of equipment. Indeed, the ship was little more than a cargo hold bolted on to a trio of FTL engines and coated with thermofoam. This was nothing like the stately diplomatic cruisers he was used to travelling in. The recycled air smelled stale, despite the scrubbers, and it was almost unbearably hot.
Sykes gestured to one of the sleep capsules. ‘That’s the VR sync,’ he said, his voice tinny through the helmet speaker. ‘Let me know once you’re done, and we’ll make the jump.’
Yano nodded. He used the grab hoops randomly decorating the hold to pull himself into the capsule, and once he was strapped in, he accessed the VR sync with his IHD and fell into a state of unconsciousness.
He awoke after what felt like a full night’s sleep to find himself standing in a standard VR briefing chamber. The room was drum-shaped, filled with an oval table, eight chairs and a scattering of holo projectors. Light poured in through a two-metre window encircling the full diameter of the room. Outside, there was nothing except endless green grass and above it a featureless blue sky.
There were two other men sat at the table, both of whom he recognised. The first was the President of the UN, Rick Aurelius, looking positively dishevelled. The second was Yano’s boss and the head of the UN Diplomatic Ministry, Xander McKone. He looked much less dishevelled.
‘Sit down, please,’ Xander said, gesturing to one of the chairs. Yano sat, vaguely amazed that he was talking to the President.
Aurelius cleared his throat. ‘I’ve been told that within the Xeno Division of the Exigency Corps, you’re the best,’ he said without preamble. ‘Spare me any false modesty you might have at this point, and tell me truthfully whether this is the case.’
Yano shrugged inwardly. Certainly he was one of the best, though he was genuinely unsure whether he was the best. McKone obviously thought so; otherwise, he wouldn’t be there.
‘Yes, sir. I am very good at what I do,’ he decided, even if his xeno diplomacy had been a little light recently. Practically non-existent, in fact.
‘Good,’ the President continued without pause. ‘What I’m about to tell you is highly classified, though doubtless it will soon become common knowledge the galaxy over,’ he grumbled. ‘We have a developing Code Cyan. A short while ago, the kaygryn attacked one of the provari crusade fleets in the Vadian Spiral. The provar are probably hours from obliterating the kaygryn. In fact, they have already started attacking local targets, one of them being Vos’Shan on Uvolon.’
Yano felt his mouth go dry but managed to nod curtly and professionally.
‘To make matters worse, we have a colony there,’ McKone added, his voice calm.
‘Anternis,’ Yano said. He had been there on holiday.
‘Precisely,’ the President replied. ‘We have measures being implemented as we speak to ensure the safety of the civilian population, and in any event, we are not about to rush into a war against a superior enemy. Obviously, we believe it is in everyone’s best interests to defuse the situation as soon as possible.’ McKone nodded sagely next to him. ‘To that end, we have called a mandatory summit in line with Galactic Protocol Nine.’
Yano nodded. More than anything, he was surprised; this sort of thing didn’t usually take more than a few hours to become UN-wide news. Beyond his initial shock, though, was greed. There had been no decent xeno work recently, nothing interesting since Merisgard. This situation – terrible though it was – would generate a significant amount of coverage, and he would be at the middle of it, centre-galactic-stage. To lead on such a diplomatic mission would make him.
‘Where is the summit?’ he asked mildly.
‘Gonvarion,’ McKone replied.
Yano shrugged and nodded at the same time. It was the obvious choice. The traditional summit venue, Gonvarion had been a non-contentious territory for centuries, maintained by the peace-loving zhahassi deep within the Zhahassi Commonwealth. Every trans-civilisational summit for the last hundred years had taken place within its famed Memorial Tower.
‘You will go there immediately,’ the President said, standing up. ‘Xander is in the process of assembling a team – they will meet you there. You will receive your full mandate on arrival.’
McKone stood up as well. ‘Good luck, Yano,’ he said. ‘There will of course be a full support network back on Vargonroth as well. We aren’t throwing you under the bus.’
Yano nodded, this time slightly uncertainly. He hadn’t thought he was being thrown under the bus. It was not like McKone to make such a clumsy statement.
‘Good. That’s all we have time for right now,’ the President said. ‘You have your instructions. We’ll speak again in the near future.’
Yano was about to say something else when the VR sync terminated, and he was left blinking dry-eyed at the dark interior of the sleep capsule in the cramped and horrible Blue Bolt. Blearily, he unclipped himself from the harness and pushed the door open, floating free.
‘Gonvarion,’ he croaked to Sykes, feeling like he had just woken up from a coma. ‘We’re going to Gonvarion.’
BORDERLANDS
‘Be careful what you say. They are watching us right now.’ (trans.)
Deputy Executor Tel’Caan Son on the United Nations Intelligence Service, overheard at the summit of Acturis
She had been in the VR sync for less than an hour when the message came through. Usually it wouldn’t have bothered her, except this time she had selected one of the sync’s staggeringly large collections of Ultraporn programs to run while she slept.
She sighed and shrugged off her computer-generated lover’s hands. The program immediately sensed her receding libido and misinterpreted it as boredom with the simulant. Hastily it offered her the option of syncing with a real person, but she politely declined. Having vigorous cybersex with the avatar of what was almost always going to be a teenage boy had never appealed to her.
The moorland breeze ruffled her dark hair as she stood up, pulled her underwear back on and tucked her breasts back into the 19th-century bodice she was clothed in. Tonight she had opted for a program with a setting akin to that of Wuthering Heights, though doubtless its contents were considerably more pornographic than the original text. Or at least it would have been had she been allowed to finish.
She turned around and dismissed the unfeasibly perfect (and perfectly naked) simulant, who faded into nothingness. In his absence, she was left standing outside a small, empty farmhouse. To her left sat a pair of squat brick outbuildings and to her right a pen of sheep, or at least what the program insisted sheep used to look like, unlike the pulsating vats of GM meat which passed for modern Terran livestock.
She exhaled loudly, her eyes scanning the rolling moorland beyond the farmhouse, marshy green hills punctured by fingers of grey rock and covered with ferns, stretching all the way to the horizon and the looming slate-grey sky. She briefly felt like running, running into the moors, feeling the cool rain on her face and the soft, squelchy ground beneath her feet. Instead, somewhat dejected, she opened the message. It was from another agent, Karris Haig, who was monitoring Vos’Shan via aerial drone from Anternis’s UNIS installation. It read simply:
Commander Iyadi is on the move.
She cursed softly. Haig wouldn’t have disturbed her sleep without it being important, and it was.
She had her IHD cancel the program and awoke to find herself staring at the inside of her sleep capsule. The words ‘Welcome back Lyra Staerck’ flashed in front of her, followed by ‘It is 03:45 local time’. She unstrapped herself from the harness, pushed the door open and stepped out into the module.
The mission station was reminiscent of a deep space relay, a cramped, cubic unit with bolted-on sleep and ablutions capsules, and jammed full of holos and operator consoles. A locker towards the south-facing wall contained a UNIS-issue Mantix suit complete with refraction-stealthing capability and a palm-coded railgun, while the rest of the available space was taken up by exterior drone housing, counter-LRIS generators and electronic warfare pods.
Lyra walked two short yet awkward steps to the module’s only chair and activated the master command console. Immediately, the wall in front of her turned transparent, affording her an unparalleled view of the kaygryn nation state of Vos’Shan from a thousand metres up the gentle northern slopes of the Tiberean Mountain range, the natural land border between Vos’Shan and Anternis. She keyed in a number of authorisation codes and accessed Haig’s drone, currently circling the city two kilometres overhead. Once she was satisfied the optic feeds were running and recording, she established an encrypted, audio-only link with the Anternis installation.
‘What’s going on?’ she asked, allowing her IHD and the station’s intelligence processors to digest all of the pertinent information for her. So far there was very little.
She heard Haig sniff on the other end of the line. ‘Iyadi is moving,’ he said tiredly. The gravelly, drained state of his voice made her itch for a stim.
‘From where to where?’ she asked.
‘From his hab to I-don’t-know-where-yet,’ Haig replied. He coughed. ‘You want to take this one?’
Lyra snorted unsympathetically. ‘I hope that was a joke.’
‘Hmm. Fine,’ Haig replied, stifling a yawn.
They sat in silence while the drone’s enhanced optic feed zoomed in to their quarry, proffering a whole load of useless data as it did so. Iyadi was a kaygryn troop commander of one of the city’s many sanctioned militia groups, captaining about two or three thousand volunteers currently camped out to the north of the settlement. Kaygryn forces had been building up in Vos’Shan over the last few months, much to the bemusement of UNIS, and taking into consideration the fact that Anternis maintained no UNIS presence beyond a deep space relay in the Upper Vadian Spiral, Lyra had been drafted in from a considerably more intense posting on Borealis 174 to pull together and surveille a list of kaygryn of interest.
She watched as the feed closed in on a solitary figure meandering through a narrow street. Iyadi was typical of most kaygryn: average human height, dark skin covered in close-cropped dark fur, and a leathery, craggy head with grooved barbs in place of where human hair would have grown. Like all kaygryn, he also possessed a pair of vestigial arms positioned roughly halfway down his ribs, a hangover from their artificially accelerated evolution at the hands of the provar.
A quick scan from the drone showed that the kaygryn was intoxicated on human draft beer, imported from Anternis, and post-coital.
‘Someone got lucky,’ Haig murmured and then snorted. ‘He’s fucking drunk.’
‘Literally,’ Lyra replied drily. She watched in silence for another five minutes. ‘Karris, what am I supposed to be looking for here? He’s just walking.’
‘You say that,’ Haig said, ‘but look at this.’
At the top left-hand corner of Lyra’s main screen, a group of holos appeared, depicting all of the kaygryn of interest they were supposed to be keeping an eye on. The holos automatically clustered around a single, dome-shaped building near the centre of the city.
‘Wait – they’re all in there?’ she asked, concern creeping into her voice.
‘All of them,’ Haig replied. ‘Even Oné.’
Oné was the Vos’Shan’i fleet skarl and the most elusive of all of them. It was rare for any of these kaygryn to be seen together, but for reasons unknown, Oné especially.
‘What do you think?’ Haig asked.
Lyra frowned. ‘What’s that building? Have I seen it before? Do we have any eyes or ears inside?’ she asked. It should have been easily possible for the drone to see and hear inside the hab, even from two kilometres above.
‘Nope, another deadzone. It’s just a regular kaygryn hab. We’ve tried infiltrating local assets into them before but they never gain access. You know what they’re like about their habs.’
‘Yeah,’ Lyra murmured. She vaguely recalled reading the dossier on other notable deadzoned habs around the city. It looked like they had just found another.
‘Do they know we’re watching?’ she asked.
‘Unlikely. Kaygryn intelligence is a joke.’
‘Doesn’t mean they don’t know,’ Lyra scowled. Haig’s laziness annoyed her.
She watched as Iyadi swaggered into the domed building and disappeared from her screen. She ordered the drone to try and penetrate the deadzone anyway, but it was futile without engaging some seriously heavy-duty LRIS. Whatever they had inside the building, it was advanced.
‘There are only a few electronic warfare pods I know that can create a deadzone that strong,’ she said. ‘We checked the arms market for any unusual kaygryn activity, didn’t we?’
A moment later an e-dossier appeared on her screen, displaying the results of a comprehensive search through the various legal and illegal galactic arms markets active on and around Uvolon.
‘We have, and it turned up zippo,’ Haig replied a few moments later. ‘Besides, EWPs that strong aren’t that uncommon. We sell a lot of them. To a lot of people.’
Lyra wrinkled her nose. ‘It’s almost like the UN enjoys making our lives difficult.’
‘Ha,’ Haig replied unenthusiastically.
They watched the feed from the drone for another hour, during which nothing happened. Once it was clear nothing else was going to happen, Lyra wordlessly left the drone in Haig’s hands and closed down the master operator console, letting the station tick back over to its VI-controlled night shift. She returned to the sleep capsule and drifted into plain, deep unconsciousness.
The capsule woke her at the much more sociable hour of 09:00 local time. Yawning, she climbed back out and reactivated the console to see that the drone was still focussing on the same building. She quickly undressed and entered the ablutions cubicle opposite the capsule, and activated the express wash function. Several nozzles sprayed her with an antibacterial vapour for thirty seconds, before they vac-dried her. She exited the cubicle, donned a t-shirt emblazoned with the UN insignia and a pair of loose-fitting shorts, and sat down in front of the command console chewing on a stick of tooth cleanser.
With a wave of her hand, she reinstated the encrypted link to Haig. ‘Karris?’ she asked.
‘Good morning,’ he replied almost immediately, sounding even more exhausted.
‘Anything happen overnight?’
Another bout of holos appeared on her screen. ‘Iyadi sent a few doppelgängers out of the front door overnight to try and throw off any surveillance. They’re all still milling about the city. I tasked a couple of slaved subdrones to watch them anyway, but we were able to rule them out pretty quickly.’
‘He’s suspicious,’ Lyra said, swallowing the cleanser gum.
‘True, but that doesn’t mean he knows anything. Anyway look, I need to sleep. Have you got this?’
Lyra briefly cast an eye over the overnight intelligence from the VI. ‘Yes,’ she said, satisfied that there was nothing else save the multiple doppelgängers. ‘I can take it from here.’ Her screen was populated with the drone’s daily command list as Haig logged off, and then he was gone.
She watched the city for an hour through the enhanced optics of the drone, compiling information for her monthly report as the sun steadily climbed into the sky. It was more of a formality than anything else. Since she communicated with Haig almost every day, his own reports contained all of the pertinent information she was able to distil.
After a while, she opened the module’s food locker, took out a few ration packs and chewed on one of the pink, foamy bars. She played around with the drone’s optics, cycling through the visible and non-visible spectrum, but the deadzone prevailed each time. Mild LRIS also bounced off the deadzone harmlessly and continued to do so even when she dialled it up. They would need naval-grade hardware to crack it. Though she would never admit it, it was galling to be outsmarted by a kaygryn.
She spent another few hours reviewing intelligence with the assistance of the module’s on-board VI while the sun continued its punishing climb, cooking Vos’Shan with its powerful rays. The location of the Bayscillic Ocean just to the south of Anternis made the air incredibly humid, and she knew that outside the module, daily temperatures could easily reach forty degrees Celsius. Once she began to sweat, she purged the atmosphere and activated the climate control scrubbers, refreshing and cooling the station’s interior, then activated a video feed and set it to record.
‘Special Agent Lyra Staerck, UNIS serial number 983082-16 Omega. Mission Station designate Vos’Shan One, Uvolon, Upper Vadian Spiral.’ She paused to let her IHD add its own unique time and location stamp to the triple-encrypted transmission and then resumed with well-rehearsed words. ‘I am still observing Commander Iyadi and the other identified kaygryn of interest. The situation remains unexplained. Irregular kaygryn troops have been growing in numbers for the last ninety days, though to what end remains unclear. Drone scans have now counted ten thousand, most concentrated in a camp three kilometres north of the Tiberean Mountains.
