Reclamation (Book One of the Art of War Trilogy), page 6
‘Last night we observed a gathering of a number of KOIs, including Commander Iyadi and the kaygryn fleet skarl, Oné. It is of note that Oné has now become the most elusive of the KOIs. This marks his third sighting in the last thirty days. I append drone optic records for reference.’ She did so via her IHD. ‘Note that the building which they currently occupy has been deadzoned to any long-range invasive scanning – and has been for an unknown period of time. Agent Haig has the full dossier available on request. It seems that there has been no new or historic kaygryn activity on any of the international arms markets concerning EWPs which might emulate these effects. Conjecture: they have stolen the pods, been provided with them by another Tier-Three player, or they were in possession of advanced electronic warfare countermeasures before we even began monitoring Vos’Shan.’
She paused the report, rubbing her neck. The last of those scenarios almost certainly wasn’t true. On provar insistence, the Treaty of Hadan’s Reach had resulted in the confiscation of almost all kaygryn advanced warfare technology. She pushed the thoughts from her mind. She was not immune to the UN’s collective guilt for Hadan’s Reach.
‘There is nothing else of interest to report. We will continue to observe until ordered otherwise. As an addendum, I would repeat my request for better resources; we are reliant on one ancient observation-only drone seconded from UNAF and one dedicated satellite with no naval-grade LRIS capability.’ She paused again to stop herself getting worked up. She had been asking for better equipment since she had arrived. ‘Staerck out,’ she finished tersely, packaging the transmission before sending it to the Anternis installation over an encrypted link. Once the report had been confirmed received by the installation VI, she reclined in the chair, clasped her hands behind her head and closed her eyes.
Her IHD roused her an hour later, after she had evidently dozed off. In itself, it wasn’t a problem. The module’s VI, drone surveillance and her own IHD were programmed to track any suspicious activity, and her job as a human operator was designated as seventy-five per cent redundant. Still, she was annoyed with herself. She sat forward and enlarged the drone’s optic feed on the tac screen.
And felt a stab of adrenaline through her guts.
‘Jesus fucking Christ,’ she said, staring wide-eyed at the screen.
The kaygryn were on the move, and in force. Four columns of militia were moving up the base of the jungle-strewn mountain slopes. There were hundreds of the aliens, clad in all manner of scrappy, ragtag armour, some clutching outdated chemical-propellant rifles, others railguns. Some were even carrying melee weapons, slung over their shoulders or dumped in push carts.
She quickly activated an emergency channel, and moments later Haig was on the other end of the line.
‘Karris, what the fuck is going on?’ she asked, linking him into the drone’s optic feed.
There was a moment’s silence. ‘Fuck,’ he agreed. ‘When did this start?’
She quickly checked the drone feed. ‘We started recording twenty minutes ago. Half the bloody encampment is moving south.’ The Suspicious Activities Alarm should have sounded immediately once hundreds of armed aliens began to move towards Anternis; there was no way the triple surveillance net would not have picked it up. Angrily, she increased the sensitivity of the alarm, despite the VI insisting it was in full working order. The protocols would have to be thoroughly reviewed.
She enhanced the drone’s optic feed and scanned the kaygryn militia lines. She swore when she saw them: surface-to-orbit missile batteries, at least one per column.
‘They’re moving heavy artillery,’ she said, her eyes wide with incredulity. There must have been an explanation for it. ‘Where on Earth did those STO batteries come from? They haven’t done something stupid like declare war on us have they?’
Haig didn’t reply. Rather than wait for an answer, she opened a new e-dossier and started making notes on some of the heavier weapons being pushed and dragged up the mountains. Some of them were antiquated shell-loaded guns with three-metre barrels, propelled on metal caterpillar tracks by large, smoke-belching engine blocks. Others were sleeker and more modern satellite-guided, surface-to-orbit missile launchers, though some were being pulled by lumbering beasts of burden. The disparity in kaygryn technology was fascinating.
‘I’ve spoken with Aryn Vance over at the UNAF base,’ Haig said. His voice was strained with annoyance. ‘Apparently he was pre-warned by the kaygryn attaché that they were going to be conducting military exercises this afternoon, and we have formally sanctioned it. UNAF have their own drones surveilling the border as we speak. So nothing to worry about.’
Lyra didn’t take her eyes off the screen. ‘They have a dozen heavy artillery pieces here, Karris,’ she said. ‘Surely we would have picked up on this if it was a pre-planned exercise.’
Haig sighed. ‘Look, Vance says it’s a formally sanctioned exercise, so it’s a formally sanctioned exercise. It’s their country so they can do whatever they want, provided they don’t cross the border. Relax. Let them get on with it, and if they get too close, we’ll have to warn them off.’
Lyra nodded. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Sorry to wake you.’
‘Don’t worry about it; I’m glad you did,’ Haig replied and was gone.
She didn’t doze off again. Instead, she spent the next few hours observing the troop columns and making notes. Disturbingly, detailed drone scans indicated that every ranged weapon the kaygryn had with them was in working order and supplied with live ammunition. Each artillery piece had also been cleaned, judging by the particles of residue the drone was able to detect, and was ready to fire. There was even evidence that some of their melee weapons had been sharpened.
She spooled back in time through the drone memory banks to watch the kaygryn militia encampment to the north slowly empty while she had been asleep. The encampment was made up of hundreds of tents, each dome-shaped, and all made from the same heavy brown fabric. Some were huge, housing hundreds of the aliens; others were smaller, which she assumed housed the officers. A motor pool to the south of the camp held all manner of technologically advanced and technologically backward vehicles, as was usual within post-Hadan’s Reach kaygryn society. It was from that pool that the artillery pieces had come from, though the surface-to-orbit batteries were certainly a new addition. She had the VI search the galactic arms markets for recent purchases of Sauben E0-16 Hydra missiles, the particular brand which the drone had identified. Predictably, the search of both illegal and legal markets turned up nothing.
Once she had finished reviewing what she had missed, she revisited the last thirty minutes of activity around the Iyadi deadzone. She was frustrated to find that he, along with the other kaygryn of interest, had remained inside the hab – in itself odd, given that what was taking place to the north would undoubtedly require senior military direction. She made a note to redouble their efforts in gaining access to the deadzone. They would probably have to infiltrate the higher orders of the militia with local assets – perhaps even turn some of the officers themselves. She snorted. That was going to be nigh on impossible.
She collated her notes and appended the drone recordings and sent it to Haig’s office as an e-dossier. Then she double-checked the clearance Aryn Vance had supposedly given the kaygryn to perform this charade of a military exercise. To her surprise, she found that the UNAF base had indeed authorised it weeks before, though they had neglected to tell the UNIS team. That was irritating: her paranoia had been expecting a last-minute request.
She used the subcutaneous inserts in her hands to manipulate the holo so that the optic feed from the drone panned across the four columns of kaygryn troops, trying to build up a more accurate picture of what they were dealing with. Each column consisted of roughly a hundred kaygryn and on average three artillery pieces. To give them their credit, they moved at an admirable pace given the technology they were utilising, and the lead troops of each column had already made good progress. That said, the lower, shallower slopes of the Tiberean Mountains were an easy climb, and what was more, dozens of roads and pathways had been cut into the side of the mountain from a now decommissioned quarry, further aiding the ascent. She estimated that they would crest the plateau on which the mission station was situated by the early evening.
Her attention was drawn to one of the holos crowding the tac screen. Frowning, she enlarged it to see that it was the feed from Uvolon’s meteorological satellite, issuing an amber storm warning. It pulsed orange, filled with swirling, kaleidoscopic graphics denoting pressure patterns, wind speed and precipitation. According to the feed, it would continue until midnight.
‘Good,’ she muttered to herself. Outside, she could already see dark clouds sailing low overhead, heading north from Anternis. Heavy rain would make the kaygryn attempt at the summit treacherous, especially with heavy machinery. If they were smart, they would abort the whole silly exercise.
Now another holo took precedence on the tac screen, the feed from an invasive diagnostic which their drone had infiltrated remotely into the kaygryn intelligence network, such as it was. The program continuously scanned all known communications frequencies that the kaygryn militias, regular army, air force, navy and government and administrative apparatus used, as well as the Uvolonese black market. It also made covert copies of all files transferred between those bodies, and flagged suspicious data using state-of-the-art autonomous discrimination programs.
The data streams appeared as sequences of numbers which her IHD decoded in real time. Most of the official kaygryn armed forces channels contained nothing but uninteresting chatter and white noise. It was the militias they were more interested in, and the militias who were, due to their chequered use of technology, much harder to track. The fact that Argish, the universal kaygryn language, was very difficult to translate into Terran further complicated matters; detecting coded messages, which were almost entirely idiomatic, was practically impossible. That was why they relied so heavily on local assets, except that half of them would tell UNIS anything for the money they received, and the other half had a strong tendency to get murdered.
Consequently, Lyra concentrated on the files they transferred more than the live chatter. Even then, the documents were mostly unintelligible gibberish, though the pictures she could understand well enough. Unfortunately there were thousands of those, topographical readouts of Vos’Shan, star charts of the Vadian Spiral, shipping manifests, thermal readouts, civilian traffic schedules... Even with the module’s discrimination programs running on full, there were too many to study. She could see why her job as a human operator was seventy-five per cent redundant. Perhaps seventy-five was charitable.
She cycled through the picture files without purpose, pausing on a few every minute. The discriminatory program had also flagged a number of images independently which it adjudged to be noteworthy, which she stored to the right side of the screen, occasionally cross-referencing them against the pool. It was only when she came across a satellite photo of the border region between Vos’Shan and Anternis for the third time that she sat forward in her seat. She cycled back through the images and frowned. Two were identical and unremarkable, but the third had a highlighted section within the northern part of Anternis City, surrounded by annotations in Argish. She assigned a VI subroutine to try and translate some of it.
She studied the third picture intently. It had been taken by a kaygryn satellite; the VI was able to verify that much. With a thought, her IHD produced a UN-sanctioned geopolitical map of Anternis. She drew her two index fingers together so that the images overlapped and then enhanced the highlighted area again.
‘Anternis General Hospital,’ she said, bemusement wrinkling her features.
Her concentration was broken by the harsh trill of the module’s incident alarm. She started in her seat and in doing so waved the holo off.
‘Shit!’ she snapped, turning to the tac screen to see what the commotion was. The drone’s rain-blurred optic feed had focussed on a mountainous area north of Vos’Shan, where a large, circular lake was slowly draining, the water swirling in a massive, foaming vortex like someone emptying a sink. As the waters receded, they revealed a grey half-torus shape, ribbed with piping and external conduits and antennae, covered in all manner of algae and Uvolonese littoral fauna.
Lyra activated her comlink to the Anternis installation. ‘Karris!’ she shouted as the kaygryn corvette’s engines began their power-up sequence, ‘you need to look at this!’
She didn’t have time to wait for a reply; another alarm went off, and one of the holos to the right of the main screen flickered over to display an orbital astrograph of Uvolon. The VI was already working hard to obtain a direct VL feed from their low-orbit satellite, even going as far as sucking power from some of the module’s ancillary functions. That was not a good sign.
‘Oh Christ, what now?’ she snarled, frantically trying to issue the drone commands. Its optic feed started to flicker and fail as naval-grade electronic interference from the corvette propagated through the atmosphere. Already her screens were being clouded with warning graphics from Anternis’s UNAF base, and she could see from yet another holo a swarm of UN combat drones clustering around the border, ready to shoot down the corvette if required.
‘Lyra! What the fuck is happening?’ Haig shouted over the link, his voice automatically filtering through the cacophony of alarms.
‘They have some kind of… buried corvette in Vos’Shan and they’re about to fucking fly away in it,’ Lyra replied, wiping her brow free of perspiration.
Haig’s voice seemed to catch in his throat for a second. ‘Lyra, they’re all on that ship. Shit, have you seen this?’
She hadn’t, but Haig had already sent her the diagnostic from their one dedicated satellite. Scanning had detected all the kaygryn of interest except Iyadi aboard the corvette.
‘How did they…?’ she breathed. ‘How is that even possible?’ She conjured up the image of the deadzoned hab only to find it completely unchanged. ‘The drone says they’re all still in the hab!’
‘Then it’s been compromised,’ Haig said matter-of-factly. ‘Scrub it. We’ll use the orbital feed.’
Lyra tapped the emergency override protocol into her console, and the drone wiped its drives before self-destructing in a blaze of plasma. The optic feed cut out for a microsecond before readjusting to the orbital feed, except that instead of being afforded a vertiginous orbital view of Vos’Shan, a haze of static filled the screen.
‘I’m not getting any reading from the orbital feed,’ Lyra said, anxiously trying to reach it via the module. Three of her holos were now showing FEED TERMINATED. The VI was desperately trying to come up with a workaround when her attention was drawn to the astrograph of Uvolon. As soon as she saw it, her flesh crawled.
‘Karris,’ she said slowly. ‘There’s a provari cruiser in orbit.’
‘What?’ came Haig’s dismissive reply. ‘Lyra we’re blind; I’m co-opting one of UNAF’s drones. You should start receiving the feed any second – let me know when you do.’
Even as he spoke, the tac screen in front of Lyra changed from static to an aerial view of Vos’Shan, this time from south of the border so that the Tiberean Mountains took up much of the view. Not that it mattered, since Lyra wasn’t watching it.
‘Karris,’ she said, this time slightly more nervously, her eyes transfixed on the astrograph. ‘There’s a provari cruiser in orbit and it’s currently following a strike trajectory.’
There was a pause.
‘Oh Jesus fuck.’
It was at that moment the corvette took off, its massive engine units vaporising much of the lake which had hidden it for the last decade. Once more, a mass of alarms activated within the module, and a fresh batch of screens popped into existence, each one recording a different aspect of the ship – roster, mass, weaponry, actual and predicted trajectories. It powered through the air, flying barely ten thousand feet above the ground, bearing due south towards Anternis. Given its vector, it was quickly flanked by a dozen UNAF combat drones flying escort.
‘What the hell are we doing?’ Lyra sang, her heart beating so hard she felt as though it was about to burst through her chest. If the corvette fired on Anternis, they would be at war – and she was less than a kilometre away from four hundred kaygryn in possession of a lot of firepower.
‘It’s out of our hands,’ Haig said simply. ‘It’s a military matter n–’
The kinetic rail strike shot through the clouds like the fist of God, punching the corvette into the grey, choppy waters of the Bayscillic Ocean in a blaze of superheated steam and blinding plasma. Lyra didn’t even know the provari cruiser had manoeuvred into its final firing position until she saw that all their orbital equipment had been destroyed, rendering several more of her holos blank.
‘Cruiser is running LRIS,’ she managed, swallowing. ‘All orbital modules are junked.’
‘I’m speaking to Aryn Vance now; we have surface-to-orbit voidar and tracking equipment. We’ll know what it’s doing soon enough,’ Haig said.
Lyra tapped into one of the UNAF drone feeds. A large wave was currently making its way across the outer ring road of Anternis, though the enormous cloud of boiling vapour resulting from the corvette’s seawater-flooded engines was already dissipating. The ship had been engulfed so quickly by the waves that it was almost like it had never happened.
She swallowed back her fear, ordered one of the UNAF drones to monitor any data traffic passing between Vos’Shan, Anternis and orbit, and opened a new e-dossier. She began to populate it with all the salvageable information from the last hour when the feed from one of the UNAF ground relays monitoring the orbit spluttered into an undulating whine. A shaky astrograph indicated that the cruiser was on the move again, and the VI’s estimated strike trajectory filled her with equal measures of horror and disbelief.
