Deserted Town, Graugebiete Region.
Nava had come to the conclusion that Rochester needed to work on expanding his quintessence reserve. Normally he would extend his viewing time by using his body’s energy to gather the required quintessence once his reserve was spent and he could go about ten minutes without resting on that basis. However, Recharge Magician could only refill his reserve, so Nava was having to cast the spell about every four minutes to keep him going. Melissa had more than twice that available and she was hardly over-endowed in the reserve department.
They had been going for ten minutes now and Courtney had just arrived with Nobuyuki. He had deactivated her Invisibility spell and then set off for the next person. Courtney was, of course, impatient.
‘Has he found them yet?’ Courtney asked as soon as Nobuyuki was gone.
‘He hasn’t said anything,’ Nava replied. She looked out of the window and across at the factory. There was still no sign of life in the place. It was starting to worry her.
She had set up in a house no more than thirty metres north of the factory. The building was intact but entirely empty. The windows were still whole, which probably indicated the exodus had not happened too long ago, but there was dust everywhere and no real indications that anyone had ever lived in the place.
‘I wonder where they’re hidden?’ Courtney asked, following Nava’s gaze.
‘No, I mean he hasn’t said anything at all. He usually gives a commentary on things as he spots them, but all he’s done since we started is tell me when he’s getting low on power.’
Courtney frowned. ‘That seems… odd.’ Her frown deepened. ‘He can’t hear us either, so there’s no point in interrupting him.’
‘None at all. He’ll give us something when he has it.’
And, three seconds later, Rochester turned and looked at them. ‘Oh, Courtney, you’re here.’
‘Did you find him?’ Courtney asked immediately.
‘I’ve found nothing.’
‘What? Maybe they’re underground. Is there a base–’
‘No,’ Rochester said firmly. ‘You’re not grasping my meaning. I’ve found nothing. There’s no one there at all. The building is empty. If it’s a factory, they even stripped the machinery out of it when they left. There’s no basement, just two floors of empty space with a few offices on the upper floor.’
‘But they detected radio signals from the place. And they’ve been watching. They’d have seen if everyone left.’
‘It’s something of a puzzle,’ Rochester said in a tone which suggested agreement.
‘Check the roof,’ Nava said. She reached out and refilled his reserve, just in case it took a while.
‘The roof?’ he asked.
‘Yes. See what you can see on the roof.’
‘As you wish.’ Turning, he fixed his gaze on the edge of the roof across the road. His eyes went blank and his body became still.
‘What are you thinking?’ Courtney asked. She sounded a tiny bit desperate.
‘It’s a decoy of some kind. If radio signals are being detected, then there has to be a transmitter somewhere and the roof seems a likely place. Now, if we’re lucky, what they’ve done is put their communications hub here so that their real base isn’t so easy to pinpoint.’
‘And they’d have to have some sort of link, something hard to detect, connecting them to the satellite site here.’
‘There’s some sort of transmission system here,’ Rochester said, though his senses remained on the factory roof.
‘Yes,’ Nava said, though it could have been a response to Rochester or an answer to Courtney. ‘Now, if only they’ve got something we can follow…’
‘I think part of it is a laser comms system,’ Rochester said. ‘Must be infrared or something because I can’t see a beam. It’s pointing… south-west.’
‘If we can get up there,’ Courtney said, ‘we can take a proper bearing. They might have it rigged with sensors though…’
‘I’m going to check to see whether it’s got any alarms or sensors,’ Rochester said. ‘If we can get someone up on the roof, we can take a proper bearing for the laser.’
Courtney looked at Nava and grinned. ‘It’s almost like he can hear us.’
‘I think he’s just smart enough to know what’s needed. If it’s clear, I can go over there and take a bearing with my suit. Then we just have to follow the line to wherever they’ve set up camp.’
‘Yeah. But I’m checking the map and there’s nothing for several klicks in that direction.’
Nava gave a shrug. ‘If there’s a laser communicator up there and the militia have detected radio transmissions from here, there has to be something at the other end of that laser. Hopefully, one of the things at the other end is Kyle and Kory.’
~~~
They were almost two kilometres away, following the line Nava had placed on their maps toward the laser’s target when a sound made Nava turn and look back. Nobuyuki was doing the same and it was him that said, ‘Down!’
Something streaked in from the west and slammed into the middle of the town. An instant later, a vast ball of fire was rising from the middle of the town along with a lot of dust.
‘What the hell?’ Courtney exclaimed. She dropped to the ground, Mitsuko and Melissa just behind her with Rochester a second after that.
Nava dropped to one knee and lowered her head. ‘They went early with the missile.’
‘Indeed,’ Nobuyuki said, ‘they–’ He cut off in a grunt as the pressure wave from the explosion slammed into him. At eighteen hundred metres, it was still enough to hit like a hammer. ‘That hurt,’ he commented, rolling onto his back and then to his knees. ‘Are the rest of you okay?’
‘We’re in high-tech armour,’ Nava pointed out. ‘Sealed armour. How badly did it hit you?’
‘I’m bruised.’
‘Better than the town,’ Mitsuko said. There was still a mushroom cloud of smoke and debris rising from the impact site. Smoke was rising in a couple of locations where the missile had caused fires.
‘Still,’ Nava said, ‘we want you fit to do your job.’ She did not even raise a hand toward him, but a second later his body was relaxing as the pain he had been concealing evaporated.
Nobuyuki bowed his head to Nava. ‘My thanks. That would have impaired my efficiency.’ Reaching into his jacket, he produced a ketcom and rolled out the screen. ‘I’ll inform Rhianna that we’re not dead.’
‘Do we want to do that?’ Courtney asked. ‘If someone in the militia just tried to kill us–’
‘The Greylings have their ways,’ Nava said. ‘No one but Rhianna is going to know we survived until we want them to.’
‘Okay, so what do we do now?’
‘We keep going. I’m beginning to think that what we find might be very interesting indeed.’
Hausman City.
Rhianna was a fair expert at many things, but her acting was second to none. She had been quite impressed with Nava’s ability when she had assessed her at Castle Grey, but even Nava was no match for Rhianna. And if Nava was no match for her, Rhianna was quite confident that a bunch of militia hicks were not going to figure out she was faking her reaction to the news that there had been a ‘terrible accident.’
Apparently, some sort of communications failure had resulted in the missile being launched a full eight hours ahead of schedule. Satellite surveillance was showing complete destruction of the Befreit Beherbergen base and, while a platoon was being sent in to comb the ruins for survivors, it was unlikely that anyone in the town was still alive. Rhianna could believe it, but she also happened to know that Nobuyuki and the others were still kicking. Hence the need for acting.
‘There will be an investigation,’ Rhianna said. She was not shouting. She had always felt that cold fury worked better and it avoided strain on the vocal cords. ‘Whoever is responsible for this will face repercussions.’
‘Miss Rhianna Greyling,’ Stefan said, standing up straighter, almo
st at attention, ‘I am responsible. Whoever made this mistake, I am responsible for the actions of my men. Whatever sanctions the Sonkei clan wish to enact, I’ll be the one who suffers.’
He was not a bad actor himself. This was an effort to defuse the situation. Rhianna was supposed to back down in the face of being told to punish a man who was not directly responsible and who was clearly willing to protect his people from her wrath. Okay. ‘I… can’t ask you to do that, Oberstleutnant. Perhaps I’m overreacting a little. I’m going to return to my quarters and consider the situation.’
She had things to do and being here playing the outraged clan member was not doing them. It was somewhat necessary, but enough was enough. She was going back to her quarters, but she would not be considering anything. She was going to find out exactly how this ‘accident’ had happened, and she had a strong feeling about where that investigation was going to lead.
Graugebiete Region.
‘You know, if we’d been ten minutes slower leaving that town,’ Melissa said, ‘we’d have been in the middle of that explosion.’
‘I was actually trying not to think about that,’ Rochester replied.
‘It’s a valid point though,’ Nava said. ‘Our opponents aren’t playing games. You should remember that.’
‘They weren’t playing games in Alliance City either,’ Melissa countered. ‘We know they’ll try to kill us if they get the chance. I just think we were kind of lucky back there.’
‘Lucky, and more capable than they expected us to be.’
‘Huh?’
‘Someone estimated how long it would take us to infiltrate the factory and do a search. They didn’t count on Chess and his Sorcerer’s Eye. We didn’t need to infiltrate the building to search it and we found the radio system far faster than they expected.’
‘Oh. Well, I’m glad to think it wasn’t down to purely blind luck.’ They were marching through more horribly uninteresting Beherbergen scenery and Melissa came to a sudden stop as she saw Nobuyuki – at point, of course – raise his fist. ‘Trouble?’
‘Do you think the landscape up ahead looks a little odd?’ Nobuyuki said. He dropped to one knee, his eyes scanning the shallow valley they had just started walking into.
It looked like something carved by a small glacier. U-shaped, it was surrounded by long hills no more than fifty metres above the valley floor. It went on a long way, maybe fifteen hundred metres, and it was difficult to tell how it ended, but there seemed to be a sharp drop-off at the end. The maps suggested a plateau of some kind dropping down a couple of hundred metres onto grasslands. They were right at the edge of the Graugebiete region.
After a second, Melissa said, ‘The glacial valleys on Avorna have more rubble in them.’ Pause. ‘Oh! And they don’t have bushes half-submerged in rocks.’
Nava followed her gaze and spotted what she had seen. One of the relatively few rocks in the valley, over on one side, did seem to have the upper half of a rock sticking out of it. Now she thought about it, glacial valleys tended to have more rocky material left behind by the glacier in them. ‘Chess, why don’t you start your Sorcerer’s Eye about twenty metres ahead and go down into the valley from there. See what you can see.’
‘On it,’ Rochester responded, going still a second later. A few seconds after that, he jerked slightly. ‘It’s an illusion! Almost the whole valley is covered by an illusion. It goes down more steeply and it widens out more than you can see. It’s more of a bowl than a valley. Someone’s gone to a lot of trouble to conceal a camp.’
‘How big a camp?’ Courtney asked. She was not really expecting a reply just yet, but she got one.
‘I’d imagine this is a Free Beherbergen camp,’ Rochester said. ‘It’s big. There must be… There has to be something like a thousand four-man tents down there. They’ve got at least one regiment and a lot of gear.’ Rochester turned, his senses back where they should be. ‘Nava, they’re preparing something. This isn’t a training camp. I think they’re getting ready for a war.’
~~~
‘Perhaps not a war,’ Nobuyuki said, ‘but they seem to be preparing some form of major assault.’
Rochester had scouted them a way under the illusion to a spot with cover on the rim of the valley and they were now in that position, looking down upon the encampment. Valley was possibly not the right word for the hole in the side of the plateau. It looked like something huge had taken a bite out of the cliff, a semi-circular area perhaps two kilometres wide and a kilometre and a half deep. Maybe it was volcanic – Beherbergen did have some active volcanoes and had probably had more activity in the past – or the result of a meteorite impacting the plateau in the distant past. Whatever the case, it had been made to look like a shallower incline using sorcery to hide a fairly large encampment of Befreit Beherbergen troops. It was now a staging area for some kind of major operation.
‘Your estimate appears to be correct,’ Nobuyuki went on. ‘I estimate around four thousand soldiers. Of the order of eight battalions or a mid-sized regiment. Their organisation isn’t the issue, however.’ He looked out toward the mouth of the valley. ‘They have armoured vehicles and several assault tiltrotors. They appear to have modern assault weapons which they’re training in.’
‘And they have Kyle,’ Courtney said.
‘Unconfirmed, but it’s probable. It seems likely that Kory and Kyle were taken prisoner to provide information on the ASF’s operations here. We need to extract them, but we also need to get back to Hausman City with this information.’
‘We’re going to need to locate them before we can extract them,’ Nava said. ‘Searching all of that a tent at a time is an unacceptable risk. I’ll keep Chess powered while he does the search. Then we can work out the best way of dealing with this.’
Nobuyuki nodded. ‘And the rest of us will keep watch and observe. We may be able to narrow the search area if we watch how the troops we can see are moving around.’
Nava nodded back and turned to Chess. ‘You’re up again, Chess. Let’s get this started.’
Chess gave a small sigh. ‘At this rate, I’m not going to be sure where my senses are when we’re done.’
‘Easy. They’re where they need to be. Let’s go.’
~~~
It seemed like eight battalions was the right arrangement, probably under a regimental commander. The tents were, on careful inspection, arranged into eight groups of twenty rows and twenty-five columns. Befreit Beherbergen were supposed to be individualistic, but it appeared they had been organised by someone with a clear vision here. These groupings occupied the north and west sides of the valley, away from the opening.
The rest of the area was more open and being used for a variety of purposes. The vehicles had been parked up in the mouth of the valley. A few of them had mechanics working on them, but they all looked fairly new. There was a drill area where a company was engaged in unarmed combat practice, and there was a firing range where another company seemed to be familiarising themselves with their new rifles, firing into the side of the valley. They all seemed to be pretty good with a rifle. There were larger tents down there, presumably used to house supplies.
In more or less the middle of the camp were a group of harder structures than the tents that made up most of the encampment. One was actually an armoured vehicle of some sort with a lot of antennas sticking out of it. Probably a command-and-control vehicle which was in constant use and came with a lot of support gear. There was a generator and what was likely a quintessence aggregator, and what was probably generating the illusion over the valley. More communications gear sat beside the vehicle, including several laser communications devices pointed in various directions; the base was talking to a number of other sites.
Traffic in and out of the command vehicle was interesting. Certainly, there were Befreit Beherbergen soldiers going in and out, but there were also others. The others had different gear and they had a collection of tents away from the battalion groupings. They even moved diffe
rently, if you observed them for a while. The Befreit soldiers were, for want of a better word, arrogant; the others were confident.
‘Mercenaries,’ Courtney said.
‘Probably,’ Nava replied. ‘In an advisory role, I think. There are a couple of them training the people doing the unarmed combat drills.’
‘Befreit have become serious enough to get help from outside,’ Nobuyuki said. ‘They’ve always viewed outside help as unnecessary before, even distasteful. This is not good.’
‘Could they be Redwing Faction?’ Melissa asked. ‘The Redwing Faction helped them in Alliance City, right?’
‘They did,’ Nava said, ‘but I don’t think this lot belong to them. If they’re involved, I suspect they’ve introduced and maybe financed the mercs. The Redwings aren’t that… uniform. Literally. They don’t have a uniform and this lot are all wearing basically the same gear.’ She reached out and put her hand on Rochester’s shoulder, sending quintessence in to refill his reserve.
‘Found them,’ Rochester said. He blinked and turned, glancing at Nava’s hand. ‘Thanks. I found them. They’re in some of the tents down there.’ He pointed to their left, toward the back of the valley, not far from the tents the mercenaries were using. Befreit officers had been seen going in and out of that area, but it was definitely in the mercs’ area.
‘How is– How are they?’ Courtney asked. Everyone knew that Kyle was her priority so there was really not much point in hiding it.
Rochester did not meet her eyes. ‘They’re… not in a good way.’ He glanced at Nobuyuki. ‘I think you were right about them being interrogated.’
‘I see,’ Nobuyuki said.
Courtney was silent, but she was not looking happy. Actually, she looked kind of like she wanted to rush down and murder anyone she saw.
Freedom, Humanity, and Other Delusions (Death's Handmaiden Book 3) Page 21
