“Why not give the courier vessels more protection on the way in and out of the system?” Shilu wondered. “An armed escort?”
“There’s too many of them,” said Erik. “Insufficient resources, and tavalai Fleet’s tired of diverting resources on State Department’s whim. Plus there’s distrust between Fleet and State Department, obviously, and State Department don’t trust Fleet guarding them either. It’s worth pointing out here, in light of this situation, that Kantovan System is the one place in tavalai space where State Department vessels are armed. They’re not actually State Department, but they’re registered in State Department’s name — officially it’s for Tsubarata security, but unofficially it’s the vault.”
“It’s not the artefacts that need guarding in transit,” Trace reminded them all. “It’s the access codes and procedures for the vault itself. The really valuable stuff in there rarely leaves, and hasn’t done for centuries. To access it, you go there, then return without it.
“Now when an otherwise unknown courier lands at their door, the vault takes a single container through their airlock, fetches the requested item, puts it into the container, and sends it back out. That’s it. Less important items, like the one Fleet have suggested we pretend to be claiming, we can take out on loan, like a book from a library. The really important stuff, we’d have to enter the vault to observe personally… but even then, no one’s allowed past the lobby.”
“So we put a bomb in the container,” Dale suggested. “Blows the doors halfway in.”
“Thus bringing down the second security doors behind it,” said Trace, “even less penetrable than the first.” She indicated that spot on the hologram. “Plus the doors have sensors that will detect any technology operating within the container. So no bombs, and none of Styx’s little recon bugs either. They’ll be spotted, and we’ll be screwed. Life signs too, we can’t just put a marine in the box and sneak in.”
“So what then?”
“We put one of Aristan’s people in the box,” said Trace, with a glance at Erik. They’d talked about this, with Aristan himself. Aristan was adamant.
“While giving no vital signs?” Shahaim asked. “Life-support is technology too.”
“Aristan’s people can trance-hibernate. For up to half an hour, without life support, with minimal vital signs. The box will have a false bottom. It should get him in. We’ve got details on the doors, we’re fairly sure he can get the airlock to cycle from within. And then we storm the vault.”
“Hang on, storm?” said Shilu. “I thought the idea was to kill as few tavalai as possible?”
Trace smiled broadly. “The vault’s not guarded by tavalai. It’s guarded by sard.” She looked around, and saw dawning realisation. And on a few, satisfaction. Dale looked positively eager. “Now, does anyone here have a moral objection to killing lots of sard?”
She looked pointedly at Romki, the only one of them who might. Romki sighed, and scratched his bald head. “Such a dilemma,” he said drily. “Being the only man on a warship with a conscience.” A few of the crew looked offended. Trace only smiled more broadly. “Fine, whatever. Let’s kill some sard, I suppose another fifty won’t make much difference after the ten thousand or so we did last month.”
“A hundred and fifty,” Trace corrected.
“And how many marines are you taking?” Dale asked.
“Can’t fit more than Command Squad,” said Trace.
“Eight against a hundred and fifty?” Shahaim asked.
“If we surprise them, most won’t be armoured in time,” Trace reasoned. “We will be. Seems fair to me.” She had some ideas, Erik knew. He doubted the sard would enjoy finding out.
“You’ll need full armour to make those odds work,” said Dale. “You’re going to move fully armoured marines through Chara, without being spotted?”
“We’ve got good intel on Chara,” Trace assured him. “It looks possible. And we’ll have help, tavalai Fleet in Chara HQ who will fiddle the surveillance cameras for us. Not many people walking around outside on Chara, population’s not big, and you can’t breathe without a suit.” Dale rubbed his square jaw, staring at the hologram. No one respected Trace more than Dale. But Dale, and most of the marine officers, believed that she was needlessly reckless of her own life in particular. “There are some more interesting defences in the vault, but nothing that a general command meeting need address. It’s marine business. What we do need to address, is graviton capacitors.”
She zoomed the hologram onto one part of the image. It was a wide hall, running deep and mostly horizontal beneath the hill behind the vault. At the end, it widened to a spherical chamber. Within the hole, yet not touching the sides, hung a spherical chamber. It did not appear to be touching the sides of the shaft in any way, but hovered, as though repelled in equal measure from the walls of the shaft.
“That could just as easily be magnetism,” Kaspowitz offered, squinting skeptically at the image.
“Except that magnetism wouldn’t make the vault harder to access,” said Trace. “Graviton capacitors do.” Kaspowitz looked unconvinced. “The intel says that’s one hundred Gs in there. Short-range gravitons, only affecting a ten meter radius about the vault.”
“Short-range gravitons,” Kaspowitz snorted. “There’s no such thing.”
“Would you be happier if we just called it magic, Kaspo?” Trace asked him, still amused. “Fine, it’s one hundred Gs in there, by magic.”
“Armour suits couldn’t withstand a hundred Gs,” said Dale. “They’re rated to about thirty, in manoeuvres. The servo-mechanics would crush. Then the drive chain, and the reactor…”
“Would collapse,” said Lieutenant Rooke, with the impatience of someone kept waiting until he could speak about the really exciting bit. “Yes, we know. Styx has a solution.”
“More magic?” asked Kaspowitz.
Rooke took a deep breath. “No. A drone.” Everyone stared at him, save for Erik, Trace and Romki, who already knew.
“You’re… she’s going to build a hacksaw drone?” Kaspowitz asked with alarm.
Rooke nodded, with nervous excitement. “We’ve got a lot of parts left from Argitori. No functioning CPUs, the Major’s people were thorough when they killed them the first time. But lots of body parts. With Styx’s new fabricators, she says she can replace the parts we don’t have, and make a new CPU, a new brain. Only drone-level, nothing like as smart as her, and completely compliant, it would follow orders and nothing more.”
“You mean it would follow her orders,” Shilu said grimly.
“And it will be armed,” Trace added. “We’ve got plenty of their weapons, some extra firepower wouldn’t go astray.”
“Wonderful,” Dale muttered. Of them all, Dale, Kaspowitz and Shilu were the most concerned by Styx’s presence.
“How does a drone help you with the graviton capacitors?” Shahaim asked.
“Styx says a drone can handle one hundred Gs,” said Trace. “Barely, and it will require some modifications. But it will be able to enter the vault without us having to deactivate the capacitors first. Which, as it turns out, we’ve no idea how to do. Rooke thinks they’ll be so deeply dug into those walls that it would take high explosive anyway, and that much high explosive would destroy the vault in the process.”
“Well,” said Dale, “you’ll have to leave real soon to get there ahead of us. Styx can’t make a new drone in a week, can she?”
“Human inefficiencies allowing,” came Styx’s voice over speakers, “the drone in question will take approximately thirty-seven hours to construct.”
“You’re kidding,” someone said.
“Rooke?” asked Erik.
“Well, um, she’s been practising,” said Rooke. “Building those new fabricators, I mean… she’s nearly completed the new model, which is, well…” he gave an exasperated laugh. “It’s nearly as amazing as hacksaws themselves, it’s not technology that any of us have any clue how to operate, it’s nearly organic in�
�”
“Lieutenant,” Trace interrupted. “Focus.” It was a running joke between them, and Rooke bit back an apology, that turned into a grin.
“Right. Sure. Thirty-seven hours… we’ve got all the parts, Styx thinks if we give her command control of Primary Re-Fab One she can reconfigure the main components in under ten hours. We’ll have to run all the other fabs to get the secondary parts, and she’s already got synthetic eco-systems of neural micros running from the reconstruction of her own brain. She thinks the new fab she’s built, plus those micros, should let her make the drone’s brain, which is the only bit we don’t have.”
“Styx, you can’t just repair an existing brain?” Erik asked the empty air.
“There is not enough functioning core left for regeneration,” said Styx. “Extensive regeneration is a function primarily for higher designations like myself. Common drones can regenerate from moderate damage, but not from catastrophic damage.”
“What will the new drone’s capabilities be?” Trace asked.
“At the beginning, almost nil. It will learn rapidly. A new drone can achieve full function within one hundred human hours.”
“You mean we’re going to have to teach it to walk?”
“It will teach itself to walk,” said Styx. “But further interactions will expand its capabilities faster, as with an organic child.” Trace looked intrigued.
“Congratulations Major,” Erik told her. “You’re about to become a mummy.”
15
Lisbeth was awoken by the sound of distant shuttles landing. They had a curfew, she thought, and were not allowed low passes even in the daytime, save for the occasional VIP transfer. Lately there had been a lot of big ones, far larger than Phoenix’s assault shuttles, landing several kilometres beyond the eight-kilometre wide square courtyards of Kunadeen Complex. The roar of landing retros echoed from multiple temple walls, each adding a new complexity and direction to the sound.
She stared at the ceiling, her mind swirling with bad dreams and recent facts from her readings. Parren history, parren psychology, a great, tangled mess of wars and upheavals, separating relative periods of stability. In truth, parren society was stable most of the time, which only made the upheavals that much more terrifying. The last really big one had been sixteen hundred years ago, had deposed House Acquisitive from power, replacing it with House Fortitude, and killed a hundred and seventeen million parren. Though some of her readings insisted that those figures had been distorted by the winning side, and understated the true casualties by a factor of between five and ten. In between the big upheavals were countless smaller ones, many just as scary if you were in the middle of them, but far more isolated.
Parren had five primary phases, or states of mind. House Fortitude was just what it sounded, and espoused the virtues of stoicism and displays of strength. House Enquiry were philosophical, and produced many great scientists and thinkers. House Acquisitive (her translator informed her was the closest English word) were primarily in business. House Creative were intensely introverted, their greatest denominational heroes known for locking themselves away for years while hatching grand designs schemes, many of them artistic, some of them not. And then, House Harmony, those people of mellow disinterest, who sought to balance all competing interests, and to be impartial between them.
Why parren brains shifted between these mental states, even parren scientists had multiple conflicting theories. Most speculated some variation on the need to maintain social harmony in shifting circumstances, though ancient, pre-technological parren had seemed to only flux between phases in response to external circumstance. With the arrival of modernity, external circumstances could be more easily controlled or ignored, and the great parren flux had begun to lead the circumstance, rather than follow it.
Ancient parren societies had made great, mystic religions out of it, with all sorts of incredible, arcane symbolism, and a myriad of dramatic and often bloody tales, or legends, about parren whose lives were torn asunder by the flux… or once destroyed, rebuilt anew. There were tales that equated the five phases with the five parren seasons… though Lisbeth thought the obvious asymmetry of five seasons, instead of the more reasonable human four, spoke to the parren’s insistent search for meaning in the great cycle, that they imposed their phases onto everything, whether a true parallel existed or not.
Today, modern science had laid a new layer of myth, legend and fact atop the old, but had not replaced it. To Lisbeth it seemed that the old priests had now been replaced by the psychologists, who occupied a pseudo-scientific role much like an old-fashioned priesthood — advising the top leaders, whispering in their ears, dictating events from behind the scenes and holding themselves separate from the fray. Many among the Togreth here in Kunadeen, she’d gathered, were also Shoveren — the Masters of the Phase, as all psychologists were known. Lisbeth had had several friends in university studying to be psychologists, and thought the parren would find it quite obscene just how ordinary and average that was, among humans. Here, only the very best and brightest were allowed, and those only after the most rigorous testing. Even with her very high scores, Lisbeth doubted she’d have made the grade. Erik might have, though. And Major Thakur, almost certainly… though perhaps would have proven temperamentally unsuited.
Somewhere high and distant, a new shuttle thundered toward a landing. Lisbeth glanced toward the balcony door, open in the warm night air to let in the breeze, and to allow silent passage to the Domesh guards who wandered through at all hours of the night, silent so not to wake her. She rarely ever saw them, though, so adept they were at fading from shadow to shadow in their dark cloaks. Occasionally one had given her a start, but she was coming to welcome their presence, particularly following Timoshene’s warnings of the dangers.
She glimpsed a guard now, a dark shadow in the doorway against the faintly billowing silk curtain. The shadow raised a weapon at her. And jerked, with a strangled grunt, arms contorting. The pistol fired, and put a hole in the ceiling. Two more shots from across the room, and the dark figure in the doorway fell, a crumpled heap on the floor. Lisbeth stared, her heart only now hammering in panic, too late to help her if she needed to flee. Which of course she hadn’t done… just sat there in her bed, half-upright on her elbows, propped in such a way to make a more perfect target.
Domesh guards converged on her, weapons drawn. One went to turn on a light, and was stopped with a hissed command by another. No lights — there could be a sniper, and the Domesh worked well in the dark. Lisbeth didn’t know where a sniper could be based — the nearest temple building was two kilometres away, and none of them had precise line-of-sight on her room. Time amongst Phoenix marines had given her at least that much appreciation of simple ballistics.
A guard examined the body, feeling within the robes. He spoke to his fellow guards, cautiously, and a conversation started. They seemed puzzled, and wary. Lisbeth recalled her AR glasses, and leaned to the bedside table to fetch them, ignoring shaking limbs to put them on her face, and insert one earpiece. Lenses flashed icons at her, and she blinked on one — translate, it said. But the guards were not speaking any parren tongue the glasses were programmed to recognise.
Timoshene crouched by her bedside — Lisbeth recognised his eyes, even past the hood and veil in the dark. When a man was tasked with potentially killing you, you remembered his every detail. “Erudarn says the intruder was not killed with bullets,” Timoshene’s translator speaker announced, and Lisbeth pulled her earpiece out. “He says the intruder was dead beforehand.”
And the Domesh named Erudarn jumped backward in startlement, eyes following something fast-moving that rose from the body. Like a man badly startled by a wasp. More words followed, fast and alarmed. Domesh guards crept across the floor, staring upward and about, searching the air. Lisbeth took deep breaths to calm herself. She thought she should get up, but doubted she would be any safer if she did. Phoenix marines had always preferred her to stay where she was until ordere
d otherwise, rather than have her rushing around on her own initiative. She doubted the Domesh would think any differently.
“You have a protector,” said Timoshene. Lisbeth stared at him. Beneath the veil, she caught a flash of amazement in his indigo eyes. “We heard stories, of the UFS Phoenix, playing with the technology of the ancient ones. All Domesh warriors have heard tales of the assassin wasps. They are the oldest tales, from Drakhil’s time. And now they have returned, with you.”
Barely half-an-hour later, Lisbeth’s chambers were a hive of activity. She sat at her table, beneath the muted yellow light that imitated two-dozen candle flames, wrapped in her bedrobe and sipping some tea. Domesh doctors examined the assassin where he’d fallen, while dark-robed guards moved silently from chambers to balcony, indicating with pointed fingers where access may have been achieved, piecing together the assassin’s movements. Togreth maids stood silently in the corners, imperiously ignoring the wary glances the Domesh sent their way.
By Timoshene’s words, the maids should have been the primary suspects for letting the assassin inside, yet Lisbeth doubted it was that simple. From what she’d read, the Togreth were mostly what they said they were — impartial servants of the House itself, who took no part in denominational disputes. And no doubt her Domesh guards had vetted all of these personally, for an extra level of screening. But that was the rank-and-file… Timoshene’s suspicions were of the leadership, and their political compromises. And Lisbeth thought of human Fleet, and how despite everything that had happened, most Phoenix crew would still trust another Fleet captain or lieutenant implicitly. Such middle-ranking officers were below the level of politics, and so remained principled and impartial, ruled primarily by their own conscience. It was only at the very highest level of command, tangled up in political concerns and double-speak, where the rot set in.
Kantovan Vault (The Spiral Wars Book 3) Page 22
