Markov's Prize

by Mark Barber

  The pale, opaque image of the closest three planetary systems was projected at the front of the briefing room. It expanded to zoom in on the relevant area and highlight the position of the Ghar fleet as Orless continued.

  “We have been tracking this fleet and it is now clear that it is heading for this system, and specifically this planet. For those of you who have not faced the Ghar before – and I’m aware that’s most of you – this will be a very different way of waging war than you are used to. There is no need for undue concern – the Ghar form a relatively small empire and are of no great threat to the Concord. We will win, but my concern is doing so quickly, efficiently, and with minimal loss of life – both military and civilian. I’m confident that in Strike Captain Tahl’s brief absence, your preparations are in the very best of hands with Senior Strike Leader Van Noor and Mandarin Owenne. I’ll hand you over – if you are content, Mandarin?”

  Owenne gave a slow and measured nod of the head to signal his approval for Orless to leave, before gesturing to the lectern. Van Noor took that as his cue and walked over to stand to one side of the briefing area.

  “Ladies, gents,” he began, “let’s take a look at what we’ll be facing.”

  Mentally activating the first animation in the intelligence brief, Van Noor glanced down at a holographic projection of a Ghar as it shimmered into life on the center of the wide podium at the front of the auditorium. The hairless creature stood a little over half the height of a panhuman, with orange-yellow tinted skin, and a hunched back. Large, red-rimmed, reptilian eyes dominated a face with a small, snout-like nose and a row of tiny, sharp teeth. The animated Ghar slowly moved its head, glancing around the room at the seated troopers. Van Noor expanded on the detail for the assembled soldiers.

  “The Ghar is a panhuman morph, most likely genetically engineered by some civilization many thousands of years ago to act as an expendable soldier. Unfortunately, they’ve spent the last couple of millennia establishing their own empire, and it’s now clear that the central aspect of their culture is an absolute hatred of anything alien to them, including us. The Ghar have no interest in cultural advancement, art, anything beyond waging war. He’s chest high to us, and not as strong or as intelligent, but don’t let the looks fool you. What’s that movie, the fantasy one with the bad special effects and hot girls in very ineffectual armor?”

  “The Warlock trilogy, Senior,” a voice called out from the left of the auditorium.

  “Yeah, that’s it,” Van Noor continued. “Anyway, these guys look like the bad guys from Warlock, but they couldn’t be any more different. They have the ability to think tactically and they’re relatively well led. Give them a weapon and they can shoot as straight as any Concord trooper.”

  Van Noor activated the next animation, and the Ghar was now clothed in a few scraps of lightweight armor and carried a long barreled automatic weapon.

  “If you meet them in this form, your Ghar adversary is most likely to be equipped with a primitive assault rifle which uses a simple chemical reaction to propel solid projectiles at a relatively high rate of fire. This weapon, which the Ghar call a lugger, is very similar to the crude weapons used by most panhuman civilizations in the early days of firearms. But as I said, that’s if you meet them in this form. This cheeky little fella you see here is an Outcast; that is, he is a disgraced Ghar who is sent into battle with just a lugger to act as cannon fodder for the main force and to draw your fire. He’s probably not even done anything wrong himself – Ghar society is completely militaristic, and if a commanding officer is judged to have made a mistake, not only is he disgraced as an Outcast, but so is his entire unit.”

  “Squad Teal would be screwed then!” A voice shouted out cheerily from the back of the auditorium.

  “Piss off!” Strike Leader Yavn grinned from the front row.

  Van Noor suppressed a laugh and continued, knowing the high morale in the auditorium would be short lived.

  “If one of you goes head to head with one of them, you’re probably going to win,” Van Noor said, “but then again you’ve got your battlesuit, which is sort of cheating, really. Your weapons and armor are at least twice as effective as theirs, and underneath that armor, you are twice the soldier he is. But that’s the problem. You see, the Ghar are happy to cheat, too. They’ve got their own armor.”

  Van Noor activated the next animation. Audible intakes of breath, gasps, and exclamations were muttered. The Ghar Outcast was replaced with a suit of Ghar battle armor; a metal sphere atop three angular legs, with one clawed arm bolted onto one side and a large gun on the other. The broad, metallic war machine stood at nearly twice the height of an average panhuman. As if to emphasize the fear it was designed to cause, the head like sensor array on the front of the body turned to scan the audience whilst machinery inside the body clunked and whirred.

  “This is what they use for armor. A single Ghar warrior is curled up inside the guts of this thing, plugged straight into the operating system by cables which attach directly to the spinal cord. The armored shell is made up of several layers of metal alloy and reinforced by a magnetic resonance shield. The gun is a multi-barreled plasma weapon, built around a central barrel capable of firing disruptor shells. This weapon’s rate of fire is notably higher than a plasma carbine and has greater armor penetration capabilities. The entire suit and weapon is powered by a plasma reactor at the rear of the unit. It’s all very low levels of technology, so the specialist measures we have for dealing with enemy technology simply won’t work – this stuff just isn’t modern enough for subverter matrixes or anything for scrambling circuits.”

  The room was completely silent. Van Noor could feel the fear filtering through the shard connection from troopers up to their squad leaders, and then up to him.

  “How good is their armor, Senior?” Strike Leader Vias asked.

  Owenne stood up from his seat on the front row and turned to face Vias.

  “Post battle analysis carried out by the C3 Intelligence Shard indicates that accurate fire from a squad of five strike troopers will yield somewhere between a twenty five and thirty quantum chance of disabling a Ghar battlesuit.”

  “Five of us blasting away gives a less than even chance of disabling one of them?” Vias exclaimed. “Meanwhile, they’re shooting back at us with a higher rate of fire and a greater chance of getting through our armor…”

  “Far greater chance of getting through your armor,” Owenne held up a corrective finger. “No no, you do not want to engage these bastards in a straight firefight under any circumstances.”

  “So what, we close with them and take them down in hand-to-hand combat?” Strike Leader Heide asked.

  “Good gosh, no! You see that claw on the other arm? There’s plenty of statistical data to suggest that this is almost as effective as the gun! No, one of these things will cut you in half with absolutely minimal effort! If a squad were to get lucky with five or six plasma grenades, you might take one down, but remember, these bastards tend to operate in groups of three to five,” Owenne changed the animation on the podium so that three of the lumbering killing machines appeared next to each other, causing clear panic amongst the assembled troopers. “So you probably won’t even be able to gang up on them. Nope, shooting or fisticuffs, these nasty fellows will take you down.”

  “So what the hell do we do, sir?” Heide demanded.

  Owenne’s features screwed up in confusion. Van Noor switched off the animations and stepped up to the center of the podium.

  “The Ghar have weaknesses,” he explained, “and plenty of them. Their reactors are crude and prone to failure. When they do fail, they can often go off with enough force to blow up the rest of their squad. Their suits are slow and clumsy; they really struggle in rough terrain. They’re too large and bulky for any attempt at stealth, and their lack of flexibility makes it impossible for them to take cover whilst advancing. The gun, whilst powerful, doesn’t have the effective range of our weapons. Don’t worry, guys, th
ese sods have got plenty of weaknesses for us to exploit. The main thing to take away from this brief is not to get caught in the open, and keep your distance. Don’t engage them in a straight firefight, and above all, don’t get anywhere near one of those damn claws. Also remember: these suits of theirs are horrifically over-engineered, way past their levels of technology. Their maintenance staff is barely able to keep these things ticking over; the longer a campaign lasts, the more they suffer from mechanical breakdowns and a lack of spares due to poor logistical planning. The longer a campaign goes, the more of those little runty Outcasts you’ll see, and less of the battlesuits.”

  A few more murmurs echoed around the auditorium, the tone seeming a little more optimistic. Even the shard feedback was a little more uplifting. Owenne clamped his hands behind his back and began pacing along the front row of seats as he began to talk again.

  “But remember, people, that’s just the standard battlesuit. They’ve also got a variant specially equipped to be even more unstoppable in close assault, and a heavy weapon variant. Observe.”

  Another animation sequence began as Ghar assault and bomber suits faded into life on the podium. Van Noor felt spirits deflating around him as he pressed one palm against his forehead and took in a long breath.

  ***

  A single room was one of the best perks of holding the rank of senior strike leader, in Van Noor’s opinion. Sure, modern technology gave a soldier some real privacy and opportunity to rest and recuperate compared to the days of old, but even in that soundproof booth, one still knew that the rest of the squad was only on the other side of a thin wall. Van Noor sat back in the chair behind his thin, grey desk and looked at the picture frame propped up neatly to the left of his datapad.

  The image showed Van Noor with his son, Jabe, sat on his shoulders as the family wandered around an animal park not far from their family home. Van Noor allowed himself a smile; they had such grand plans for Jabe’s fourth birthday, but the little boy just wanted to do the same thing they often did – a family visit to that same park to feed the same animals. That image had been captured a year ago to the day, and only a few days before Van Noor’s leave had expired and he had his consciousness uploaded to his clone before returning to the frontline.

  And that was how it happened. The norm was to go to a mental coding facility, lie down on a bunk, and allow the medics to knock you out. You awoke seemingly only a few seconds later to be informed that your memories had been successfully stored. But not this time. Shortly after Jabe’s fourth birthday, Van Noor awoke to find he was a clone. The original was dead, decapitated by a sniper some nine months after the memory upload. Nine months of complete unknown, during which he apparently had a ludicrous one night stand with an events manager on an entertainment ship, promptly confessed to his wife, and lost his entire family in one fell swoop. And here he was now, on his son’s fifth birthday, preparing the company for all-out war against the most aggressive and merciless foe he had ever faced.

  “Visitor – Strike Leader Feon Rall,” the soft, feminine tone of the dormitory shard informed him.

  “Admit,” Van Noor answered, standing up and rubbing his eyes.

  The door slid open and Rall walked smartly in, standing to attention before his desk.

  “Good evening, Senior,” he greeted.

  “The formality is appreciated, Feon, but don’t stand on ceremony. Pull up a chair.”

  The tall trooper sat down opposite Van Noor as he too returned to his chair. Rall looked up and frowned for a second.

  “Are you alright, Senior?”

  “Yeah, I’m good. Just a bit going on right now. Thanks for coming across, I’m speaking to all of the strike leaders individually just to make sure all is okay and there aren’t any undue concerns to the change in operations we’ll shortly be experiencing. Are your guys good, all things considered?”

  Rall took in a long breath and then exhaled slowly, nodding.

  “Yes, they’re fine. It came as a bit of a shock that the Markov’s Prize government just put their hands up and their weapons down. No last ditch defense of the capital, no climactic battle, nothing. I thought we were still in those early stages of flirting with each other and the proper battle hadn’t begun yet.”

  “We hit them hard in the pre-invasion strikes,” Van Noor explained. “Navy aerospace caught most of their armored vehicles and air power before they were ready. With no real support and suffering an attrition rate of ten losses for every one of ours, they were never going to last long. However, I’ve got my own thoughts. I reckon there’s a fair chance our side bombarded them with images and data from previous Ghar invasions which may have convinced them that accepting us as conquerors is infinitely more pleasant than the Ghar.”

  “True,” Rall agreed, “but if we had so much aerospace supremacy from the flyboys, why aren’t we sending a carrier battlegroup into the Ghar invasion fleet to blow it up in deep space before it even gets here?”

  “I think you already know the answer to that one,” Van Noor smiled grimly. “The navy did the pre-invasion thing for us and then disappeared. Needed elsewhere, and it looked like this invasion was in the bag before we knew of the Ghar being just up the road. Sure, C3 could possibly bring the carrier battlegroup back, but think of the risk. It’s far easier to replace a dead assault force than it is a carrier. I’m not saying we’re expendable, just that we’ve got to be realistic. We’re easier to replace if things go wrong.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Rall nodded. “We all know how the game works, gotta accept it for what it is. So what can I do to help, Senior?”

  “You’re one of only two strike leaders in the company who has firsthand experience of facing the Ghar. I’m going to be leaning on you and Althern quite heavily over the next few days. We need to work hard to keep our people alert, prepared, and confident.”

  “Confident, especially,” Rall said. “I don’t think the mandarin’s little injections at your intelligence brief did anybody any favors. ‘And remember people! Be prepared for a significant rise in your casualty rates! Up ‘til now you’ve had it easy, now you’ll really start to see some losses!’ Wasn’t very inspiring.”

  Van Noor laughed briefly at Rall’s humorously accurate impersonation of Owenne.

  “The thing about NuHu,” Van Noor said, leaning back in his chair, “is that they are fully aware of what morale is and how important it is to us basic panhumans, but that doesn’t mean they actually understand what morale is. The NuHu aren’t really known for their… ability to relate to normal people. But the sad thing is, the guy’s right. We’re gonna take some hits and we need to be ready for that. But the thing that really has me thinking…”

  “Visitor – Strike Leader Katya Rhona,” the soft voice of the shard alerted both men.

  Van Noor was glad of the interruption. It would not do for him to voice his concerns over Mandarin Owenne’s motivations in front of his subordinates, no matter how much he trusted them. Something just did not add up. Markov’s Prize was only of moderate strategic value – the loss of the jump gate and with it a path to billions of massacred and enslaved civilians would be tragic, but it would not change anything about the ongoing wars – yet the Mandarin was bringing in reinforcements from far and wide, soldiers and machines which could be employed elsewhere. Owenne wanted Markov’s Prize, badly.

  “We’ll be ready, Senior,” Rall said as he stood, “and you can count on me when the bombs start falling.”

  “That’s all I ask,” Van Noor smiled. “Send Rhona in, would you?”

  Van Noor watched Rall leave his quarters, taking advantage of the short lull in between meetings to pick up his picture frame and select another image – one of him with both Jabe and Alora, his daughter. She would be seven and a half by now.

  “Senior.”

  Van Noor looked up as Rhona walked casually in and halted in front of his desk, one hand clasped over the other in front of her as she flexed her knees slightly and looked at him expectantly
.

  “Grab a seat,” he said, replacing the picture frame on the desk.

  “Can I talk to you ‘bout something?”

  Van Noor looked up. Perhaps it was the frustration of being separated from his son on such a special day, but he found himself having to pause before responding, taking a second to control his rising anger.

  “Well, it was me who called you here, but go on, what is it?”

  “I spoke to Strike Captain Tahl before he left,” Rhona said, “about my promotion.”

  “Right?”

  “You knew about why I was promoted?” The black haired woman asked.

  “You’re questioning me about what, precisely, Strike Leader?” Van Noor snapped.

  “No, no, nothing like that, Senior. I was just wondering if I needed to tell you the whole story or if you already knew. That’s all.”

  “I knew,” Van Noor leaned back and folded his arms.

  “Well…” Rhona exhaled uncomfortably. “I expressed my disappointment. My discomfort over the whole thing. I told Strike Captain Tahl that I could submit an official complaint over…”

  “You did what?” Van Noor demanded.

  “No, no, I’m not doing anything,” Rhona held her hands up in protest. “I’m just saying that I spoke to him about my right to complain…”

  “Stand up,” Van Noor ordered Rhona curtly.

  “Senior?”

  “Get on your damn feet, Trooper!” Van Noor yelled from the bottom of his lungs.

  Her eyes wide in fear, Rhona leapt to her feet with enough force to knock her chair over, bringing herself smartly to attention.