Reclamation (Book One of the Art of War Trilogy), page 8
‘Hello ZEN,’ Vondur said, pulling his helmet on and twisting it so that it locked with the gorget seal.
‘Hello, Captain,’ ZEN burbled in a voice that sounded like liquid data. ZEN was a combat VI, an autonomous humanoid robot built by the Zhahassi Commonwealth and employed almost exclusively as infantry. Vondur had acquired it on Tranquillity after a joint UN/zhahassi anti-piracy action, and, much to the envy of every soldier he met, it followed him on most operational deployments. Consequently, he and his men had gone to great pains to ensure it was properly inducted into 11 Squadron, even going as far as having the UN and 11 Squadron insignias laser-etched onto its chest carapace.
Vondur yanked on the IHD-coded cockpit handle, and his Goliath’s thoracic cavity unlocked and split open, revealing its snug, human-shaped interior. Save a safety harness and oxygen tube, there was little in the way of visible interface; the nanotech suit he was wearing would ensure that all the Goliath’s movements were synchronised with his own.
He climbed inside, strapped himself in and plugged the tube into his helmet, allowing the hatch to automatically close behind him. As soon as it was sealed, what space remained in the hold filled with a gooey orange nanogel matrix that acted as both a very proficient shock absorber and IHD amplifier, so that when his IHD synced with the Goliath’s head-mounted optical feeds and his flight suit logged with the cockpit interface, it was as though he had never entered the vehicle at all. Indeed, the three-tonne naval-grade rail cannon clasped in the Goliath’s gauntlets felt no heavier than a standard infantry rifle.
He ran through his HUD, checking off his ammunition and ordnance counters, drone-status feeds, targeting computer overlay, fuel loads and his personal physiology indicator, the latter particularly important given that it was not unheard of for Goliath pilots to continue fighting while being unwittingly body-dead. Once he was happy with the display, he brought into reserve a three-dimensional holo map of the local terrain, overlaid with select pieces of intelligence which UNIS had made accessible via the net. A feed to the right of his vision contained the status graphics of the rest of his squadron, a small stylised Goliath each currently marked ‘Gatekeeper’ in turquoise lettering followed by the numbers 2–7. Corresponding location markers appeared on his map as well; currently they were all in a cluster over Anternis’s UNAF base. Had a civilian – or an enemy xeno for that matter – tried to access their whereabouts, the squadron wouldn’t even appear to be on the planet.
He finished running his diagnostics and activated the Goliath’s force shielding, though not its LRIS refraction. The force shielding would prematurely detonate any incoming explosive munitions and formed his last line of defence after the physical diamond-composite armour of the Goliath itself, provided he couldn’t physically shoot the ordnance out of the air. The LRIS refraction, on the other hand, made him invisible to all enemy scanning frequencies. Given that their current mission parameters dictated that they were to be a visible presence on the border, he left it off, instead activating the suit’s orange-and-blue civil compliance colour scheme.
‘All callsigns report,’ he said, performing several jumping-jacks as a last rough-and-ready test of his sync ratios.
‘Gatekeeper Seven, standing by.’
‘Gatekeeper Five, standing by.’
‘Gatekeeper Six, standing by.’
‘Gatekeeper Three, standing by.’
‘Gatekeeper Two, standing by.’
‘Gatekeeper Four, standing by.’
Vondur nodded to himself and turned to face the open hangar exit. Beyond, rain sheeted down onto the darkening landing strip, cascading over the threshold to stain the concrete floor a deeper shade of grey.
‘Thunderhead, this is Gatekeeper One, we are ready to commence Operation Beacon, on your go.’
‘Gatekeeper, this is Thunderhead,’ came the operator’s reply. ‘Updating mission objectives on your HUD; confirm acquisition.’
Vondur opened his holo map to see the crossing points over the Tiberean Mountains were now marked, as well as the recommended waypoint for the quick-reaction reserve.
‘Acquisition confirmed,’ Vondur replied.
‘Copy that. Operation Beacon is a go.’
Vondur walked towards the hangar door, ZEN to his left. ‘Lieutenant Jarvin, you and August take objective east as fire team Alpha. Sergeant Cox, take Vandemarr to objective west, fire team Zulu. Elyan and Syoba, with me in reserve. Understood?’
There was a chorus of assent. Vondur nodded to himself and stepped out of the hangar and into the stormy twilight of Anternis, illuminating the rain around him with the gaudy colouring of his fluorescent orange-and-blue armour. He could feel it as if it was pattering against his own skin.
‘Let’s go.’
He snatched up ZEN in his left gauntlet and activated the Goliath’s powerful twin Royce-Khan thrusters. They exploded into life with a flash of blue plasma and fired him into the air on a rapid response trajectory – steep incline, steep dive. Behind him his squadron followed suit, swiftly falling into a flying V formation as they soared through the turbulent troposphere. The Goliath’s enhanced optics and UNAF-grade night vision, however, meant that rather than powering through thick, low-level storm clouds, it was akin to flying on a clear summer’s afternoon.
‘Got two friendlies three hundred klicks south-west,’ Cox said over the net. ‘Bunch of bots over the City… all blue. Other than that, skies are clear.’
‘Copy,’ Vondur replied.
The base shrank rapidly behind them. He programmed his flight path to terminate at the reserve marker which Thunderhead had uploaded to his holo map, giving him a precise flight time of thirty-two seconds, then sat back and let the machine do the work. They were already directly over the Tiberean Mountains, and he could see where the last rail strike had gouged a deep scar into the rock. Thick black smoke poured from the open crater, and his HUD identified a large number of kaygryn bodies and the remains of what looked to be surface-to-orbit missile batteries.
‘I see bodies,’ he said, sharing the images over the closed net. A quick diagnostic put the tally at over four hundred separately identifiable biological masses, though that number nosedived at anything over cellular level.
‘Jeez,’ Vandemarr murmured, whistling. ‘That’s a lot of dead kags.’
‘Language,’ Vondur rebuked.
‘Sorry, chief,’ Vandemarr said quickly. ‘Just this is… not good.’
It wasn’t good. From a distance, the rail strikes had been terrifying in their raw power and the sense of helplessness they instilled, but seeing the twisted and charred corpses of the kaygryn troops jutting out of the pulverised rocks below was what brought it home. As a soldier, his task was a simple one: follow orders and either succeed or get killed, and most of the time, having such a lack of options was a comfort. But taking a step back from the situation, it was impossible not to see that there would be far-reaching implications from this skirmish.
‘We’re just keeping the peace,’ Vondur murmured. ‘That’s all we’re doing.’
His HUD informed him that he and his men had been logged as potential targets by the provari cruiser and were being actively monitored from orbit. That was both good, in the sense that the aliens were aware of their presence and so could not now be surprised by the squadron, and bad, in the sense that it was incredibly distressing. He put out of his mind the thought of the laser-accurate naval guns drawing a bead on them and instead concentrated on his descent vector, which at that moment in time was at peak velocity.
‘Disperse,’ he ordered over the comlink, and the squadron split apart into their pre-designated fire teams. He watched as Jarvin and August streaked away to his left, while Cox and Vandemarr banked off to his right. Elyan and Syoba maintained formation until seconds before touchdown, when they pulled back slightly so as to form a defensive triangle on landing, with Vondur at the head.
‘Three… two… one… I’m down,’ Vondur said, as he ploughed into the densely jungled southern slopes of the mountains. Around him branches and vines snapped off against the armour of the Goliath, and the plasma exhaust kicked up a vast plume of leaves and soil from beneath him before his feet sank into the rain-softened ground. He immediately released ZEN from his gauntlet and brought his rail cannon to bear, performing standard battlefield LRIS to sound out any lurking enemy drones.
‘Clear,’ he said when nothing appeared on his HUD. Elyan and Syoba reported the same, while fire teams Alpha and Zulu also gave the all-clear.
‘Establishing a perimeter,’ Jarvin said a few seconds later, and suddenly two graphics representing the lieutenant’s CODOR drones appeared on Vondur’s HUD.
‘Ditto,’ Cox said, and a further two drones were physically hurled into the air by the sergeant.
Vondur activated his rear-view optics to see Elyan and Syoba a hundred metres behind him, each slowly tracking their rail cannons in languorous arcs. Satisfied, he switched back to his fore-view and did the same, drawing his own cannon back and forth in a slow, methodical sweep of the jungle. The barrel was pointed directly at the sky given the gradient of the mountainside, and every so often a flash of lightning would crackle across his vision. Every time it did, the sudden light input would knock his rain-eliminator offline, affording him a split-second view of the dark, stormy dusk of Anternis.
He opened a channel to base. ‘Thunderhead, this is Gatekeeper One, we are in position and prosecuting Operation Beacon. So far no contact.’
‘Copy, Gatekeeper. Eyes peeled,’ came the tinny reply.
The CODOR drones began feeding them information microseconds later, steady streams of raw data appearing in a dedicated subscreen in Vondur’s vision. The Goliath’s filters scrubbed the feeds for anything pertinent, updating his HUD map in lieu of the now-junked orbital feed.
‘Drones returning… zero useful data,’ Jarvin observed. ‘Nada. Nothing. It’s a ghost town out here.’
‘I think we get the point, Lieutenant,’ Vondur said. He watched as ZEN stalked the jungle in front of him, appearing in his field of vision only due to the Goliath’s enhanced optics. The VI moved uncannily like a human, darting in and out of cover between the ancient alien trees, railgun up, bringing it back and forth in tight, alert arcs. After a few minutes, it disappeared over a moss-covered rocky outcrop and reappeared as a distant figure making for the crest of the ridge. It was silhouetted briefly against the roiling, lightning-lit sky, before dropping off the visual grid and appearing only as an icon superimposed on his HUD.
‘I’ve got zilch,’ Cox said as his own drones completed their initial sweep. ‘LT’s right; it’s dead out here.’
Vondur grimaced inside the cockpit and relaxed his arms slightly, bringing the cannon diagonally across the chassis of the Goliath. Still, he kept his eye on the little warning icon in the top corner of his vision, pulsing slowly, serving as a constant reminder of the provari cruiser watching from above. ‘All right,’ he said, exhaling loudly. ‘Everybody stay alert, and maintain LRIS. Understood?’
‘Copy,’ came the chorused reply.
Vondur idly tapped into a live feed from one of Cox’s drones and watched as it performed a high-velocity sweep over the city of Vos’Shan. There was little movement in the rain-soaked streets. The rail strikes of the provari cruiser seemed to have put paid to any civilian activity, and the dwellings were crammed full of white-hot bodies. The militia encampment to the north of the city was in a state of lockdown as well, insofar as rows of tents could be locked down. A small warning icon indicated the presence of weapons in the encampment, and the drone compiled a list of armaments which could be accessed at will. He declined to do so and cancelled the feed.
‘One downed kaygryn corvette, four hundred kaygryn corpses and a provari cruiser in orbit responsible for the whole mess. Anyone want to guess what’s going on here?’ Jarvin asked over the net.
‘The provar fuck with the kags all the time,’ Cox growled. ‘Someone in that corvette pissed them off, and they got smoked. Kags wheel out the orbital artillery to try and counterattack – probably thought they could make a dent in that cruiser – and they get wasted as well. End of story.’
Grunts of agreement all round.
‘That doesn’t strike me as serious enough to be classified,’ Vondur said, wincing slightly at the sergeant’s casual racism. It made it a damn sight harder to chastise the squadron for using the pejorative term ‘kag’ when Cox did it without censure.
‘What’s that, chief?’ Elyan asked.
Vondur shrugged, and the Goliath shrugged with him. ‘In the briefing Commander Vance told us that the reason the provar were prosecuting kaygryn targets was “known but classified”. I think if the provar are going to knock out a corvette in-atmosphere next to a UN territory they’re going to have a damned good reason. This is more serious than the usual provari arseholery. Serious enough to be classified over Vance’s head anyway.’
More grunts of agreement. Sometimes Vondur thought the squadron would make a good cast in a farcical play.
‘I think–’ Vandemarr started, but his potentially incisive commentary was cut off by the lieutenant.
‘Hello,’ Jarvin said. ‘Picking up something on the grid. Chief, take a look at this.’
Vondur squinted as a new screen popped up in his HUD. The feed had come from the lieutenant’s primary reconnaissance drone; it revealed a tiny, light grey smudge on a black, cold tangle of jungle. He enhanced the image as high as it would go but seemed to be unable to get any kind of satisfactory resolution.
‘What is that?’ Vondur asked, running a diagnostic via the drone. The data streams were analysed by the Goliath but produced nothing but error messages.
‘It’s human, whatever it is,’ Jarvin replied, sending him a biological readout. ‘Well, part of one. Not kaygryn, in any event. Can’t find a tissue match on any public UN database.’
Vondur felt his pulse rise slightly. That piqued his interest.
‘Can we get any clearer reading on it?’ he asked. ‘I’m getting quite strong interference.’ He cursorily checked the other drone feeds to make sure a secret kaygryn army wasn’t making its way up the mountain passes.
There was a brief pause. ‘Negative,’ Jarvin replied. ‘I’m running full LRIS on it, but it’s a tough nut to crack. Whatever it is, it is refraction shielded and Tier-Three tech.’
Vondur enhanced the drone’s optics again, but even without thick wet foliage of the jungle, it was difficult to get a clear visual. He cycled through the various wavelengths, but they all came back negative. Only infrared was showing anything, and that was faint – very faint. He dialled the view back and marked its position on his HUD map – nine hundred and seventy metres from the quick-reaction reserve.
‘Could be nothing,’ Cox grumbled.
‘It’s human and it’s shielded, Sergeant,’ Jarvin said, irritably. ‘It’s not nothing. It might be a body.’
‘But it is off-mission,’ Vondur said, wrinkling his nose. He thought for a moment. ‘Hold tight,’ he said, opening a private channel to the base. ‘Thunderhead, this is Gatekeeper.’
‘Copy, Gatekeeper,’ came the controller after a few seconds.
‘We have located an unidentifiable human mass approximately one klick away from my present location. Mass is refraction shielded, but warm and showing up on the infrared grid.’ He sighed to himself as he sent the base an encrypted readout of the object’s location. ‘Requesting permission to retrieve mass, over.’
There was a brief but perceptible crackle over the link, followed by a garbled transmission. Then, unexpectedly, the link terminated.
‘Ah, Thunderhead, say again your last, I lost the feed,’ Vondur said, assigning one of the Goliath’s diagnostic subroutines to his comms log. The link remained dead. ‘Thunderhead, come in, over.’
There was a blurt of static. ‘Gatekeeper, this is Thunderhead,’ the link suddenly squawked, activating his IHD’s automatic audio dampers. ‘We are instructed to inform you that at this time the mass is to be left undisturbed, please confirm.’
Vondur’s brow creased. ‘Thunderhead, please be advised that the mass is reading as human and Tier Three. Suspect it is one of ours, over.’
Another pause. ‘Gatekeeper, again we are informed that the mass is not to be disturbed. Please confirm your compliance, over.’
Vondur looked incredulous. ‘Thunderhead, who is advising you? The mass is warm, it is a suspected casualty and I repeat my request to retrieve the mass, over.’
The link fell silent again. ‘Something’s going on here,’ he briefly transmitted to Jarvin on a private channel before the comlink to the base was re-established. This time he added the lieutenant to the conversation.
‘Gatekeeper, base has received superseding orders from non-mission assets. I have been asked to confirm your compliance. Please do so now, over.’ A detectable element of irritation had crept into the controller’s voice.
Vondur sidelined the feed. He was half-minded to pull Vance into the link.
‘Non-mission assets?’ Jarvin said, his voice laden with scepticism. ‘Smells like UNIS to me. Or EFFECT. Non-military.’
‘Agreed,’ Vondur replied, nodding, ‘and I don’t like it. Frankly, I wouldn’t leave a warm body out here if the order came from the Strike Commander himself.’
‘Still,’ Jarvin said after a moment’s reflection, his tone betraying a latent reticence, ‘you should be careful, Captain. You don’t want to get yourself court-martialled.’
That was true. If he went for the mass now, he would be disobeying a direct order. Still, where there was a will there was a way, and he had many ways at his disposal.
‘I have an idea,’ he said, ‘but don’t say anything.’ He reactivated his link with the base. ‘Thunderhead, compliance is not possible at this time. My ZEN is already recovering the mass and due to a software fault I am unable to recall it, over.’
