“Descender Ikto One,” said Po’koo without preamble. “I am Captain Po’koo Tok’rah’pan, and this is my co-pilot, Sia Shan.” Sia Shan had been a friend of Tif’s, back on Chogoth. An escaped woman from the backwards Rahresh Coast, she’d studied law, and had encouraged Tif to pursue her dreams of flying. Sia Shan had been murdered by her own brother, travelled from Rahresh in disguise to avenge the family’s honour. Tif hoped that Sia’s spirit would appreciate the gesture, to include her in such an important mission for the whole Spiral as this. “We have Fleet requisition orders for a vault item.” Po’koo pulled a pad from a vast flightsuit pocket, activated a code and handed it over. “That is the vault item number, the requisition order number, and the Fleet command code clearance. It is all in order.”
The State Department official stared at it, wordlessly, eyes scanning. “You are Ko’Chu’Tah Transportation?”
Po’koo’s huge, four-limbed shoulders straightened further. “That is my company. I am its chief.”
“Our records state you have not been to Chara in eleven tavalai years. Your company has been implicated in illegal activities in several systems. Smuggling.”
“Your Fleet chooses to send whom it chooses,” Po’koo growled. “My company has been found legally guilty of nothing, by tavalai authorities. Heavy descenders are short in quantity. If State Department blocks companies like mine from executing Fleet transportation orders, no one will be able to use your precious vault.”
“That would suit my authorities very well,” the tavalai said drily. “Inspection proceeds now. Clearance codes will follow shortly. Regulations state that the Captain shall remain with his ship. Your co-pilot will come with us, for formalities.”
Tif tried to keep the alarm from her glance, as she looked at Po’koo. “She has little knowledge of this bureaucracy,” Po’koo growled. “She only flies, take someone else.”
The tavalai blinked, a flicker of third-eyelids. “She?”
“Yes, she. An escaped woman. If they all fly like her, they’re welcome to come work for me.”
“Your engineers are needed aboard for the inspection, as are you. Your co-pilot comes with us.”
Po’koo frowned, a gathering of heavy wrinkles upon that massive brow. Then he jerked his head at Tif. “Go. Do what they say but tell them nothing more. Remember our contract, and the confidentiality of our client.” Tavalai Fleet, that meant. Everyone knew how little State Department and Fleet liked each other.
“Yes,” said Tif, trying to control her nerves. Time amongst humans had made her self-conscious of just how much her fear showed. By kuhsi standards, humans were nerveless in the presence of danger, and tavalai positively comatose. She took a deep breath, and willed her heart to stop thumping. “I will go. Tavalai procedure, yes?” With what she hoped was irony.
Po’koo smirked, an upturn of thick lips. “Damn tavalai nonsense, yes. You go. Try not to fall asleep.”
Dale pulled himself from the water, through riverside reeds and beneath the cover of orchard trees, and willed his muscles to stop shaking. The water had been plenty cold, despite Tooganam’s assurances, and after Dale pulled off his facemask and airtank, he simply huddled on the ground and rubbed himself furiously, trying to get some heat back into his chilled skin.
About him, his team did the same, though Woody Forrest’s preferred method of warming was to lie on his back and do crunches. Tong stayed in the reeds, apparently unbothered, and began stowing his and the others’ scuba gear in cover. Tong was from the northern hemisphere of Lewych, a cold climate on an otherwise temperate world, where his parents had run a wildlife resort. He’d joined the marines already an expert cross-country skier and a crack shot, and rarely missed an opportunity to let everyone know how little the cold bothered him. He gave Private Reddy a hand out of the water as he arrived.
“Spots, you’re blue,” Tong whispered, as Reddy staggered out, teeth chattering. Reddy was from Shengli, which was mostly warm and humid. Before joining the marines, he’d barely known what cold was.
“Someone get my robe,” Reddy muttered, giving Kadi a hand out as Dale unsealed the plastic bag containing his rifle. A little water had gotten in, but a quick check confirmed that the mechanism was working fine. All their newly-acquired weapons were tavalai-made, and so obviously would work in a little water.
Milek was last out, also struggling with the cold. Parren were slender, without much natural insulation. Dale wondered how metabolism worked for a species that never seemed to get fat. Or maybe it wasn’t metabolism at all. Extreme mental discipline among humans was an elite phenomenon, but with parren it was mainstream. Maybe they could get just as fat as humans if they wished, but never did. Milek wore regular civvies like the rest of them, the first time Dale had seen a parren without obscuring robes. Dale was halfway surprised that Milek’s beliefs had allowed him to be this revealed, but then, it seemed that Aristan’s acolytes were pragmatic where their mission required it.
It was literally a revelation to see how closely the parren body mirrored the human, save for longer arms, narrower waist and that strange, flat-topped head with the narrow jaw and wide cheekbones. Tavalai were also humanoid, to use the chauvinistic term, but far less-so than this, and even kuhsi had those double-articulated ankle-joints and short, padded feet for extra spring. Seeing Milek in civvies was almost enough for Dale to reconsider his disdain of those crazy conspiracy-cultists who insisted that all humanoid aliens had a common ancestor whose seed had been spread about the galaxy by the Ancients many millions of years ago…
Their gear stashed in the thick reeds, Dale assigned Reddy to point, then Forrest, himself, Kadi and Milek, with Tong guarding their rear. The low forest through which they moved was all fruit trees, planted in neat rows and watered with tubes from the artificial river down which they’d swum. Soon the trees gave way to a thick species of sugar cane, thickets of tall, hard stalks and long, ribbon-like leaves. The cavern ceiling was no more than ten meters overhead, and rowed with lines of heating lights. These fields, Tooganam had showed them in maps, went on through caverns like this one for kilometres. Peering through the high leaves of the cane, Dale could see a tall, U-shaped harvester, with wheels to run down these aisles between the plants, and a central mechanism for cutting and stripping. Tooganam had possibly worked on that machine himself, in his younger days.
“Five hundred meters straight ahead,” came Jokono’s voice in Dale’s ear, and a simple map display appeared on Dale’s glasses — the mansion, the river running alongside, and their current position in the crop fields. “I’m not seeing any security triggers in the crops, I’m guessing they can’t place any because the farming machines will trip them.”
“Any chance you’re wrong?” Dale whispered as he moved.
“Always a chance, Lieutenant. But so far my access has been total.” It had been. The underground portions of the river had been blocked by multiple security gates, each with separate mechanisms, but Jokono had opened them in succession from outside, without anyone appearing to notice. He seemed quite excited by these new capabilities that Styx’s technology was affording him, which itself made Dale wary. It was unwise to be lulled into a false sense of security by advanced technology that no one truly understood, particularly when operated by a man who for all his experience, had never before been in the military, let alone the marines.
“Okay guys,” Dale formulated to his marines on uplink, “keep your eyes open and don’t just assume the Joker can see everything. For all we know, they could have let us through those gates on purpose and have a trap waiting.”
Approaching the edge of the cane field, Reddy got down and crawled. The rest stayed low, and then Dale saw what Reddy saw, projected on his glasses. It was a large, two-storey house, surrounded by water ponds and green water plants, as though emerging from a lush swamp.
“Looks like a thirty meter dash,” Reddy murmured on coms, panning his view back and forth. “Layout’s just like old grandpa tavalai said. Road
down the side, only one route in or out.”
“I’m coming up,” said Dale, not liking the limited view on his glasses. “Joker, you seeing this?”
“I have a feed,” Jokono confirmed. “The mansion security is as autistic as feared. There are not even any access gates in the network for my systems to hack. You will have to establish contact from within.”
Dale arrived at Reddy’s side, fixed his glasses’ camera and zoomed. The lenses adjusted the image up-close without losing much resolution. The mansion was large without being huge, looking more like the private residence of a wealthy individual than an administrative building. Its outer pillars were not vertical, as a human mansion might have, but spread outward and leaned in, as though preventing the walls from falling out. Maybe a traditional tavalai design, Dale thought, dating to when tavalai made bark huts in swamps, with unstable walls.
This mansion, Tooganam had assured them with all the confidence of one recently briefed by tavalai Fleet Intel, was the current State Department nerve centre. A network nerve centre could be located anywhere, and it made sense that three hundred meters underground might be considered safer than above ground, in a teeming city filled with unruly aliens. State Department changed those nerve centre locations for further security, but tavalai Fleet Intel were tracking those changes. It was ridiculous, Dale thought with teeth-grinding tension, to be doing the bidding of tavalai Fleet in their minor civil war with State Department. Just a few months before, they’d all been at war with tavalai Fleet and State Department both. But the small countdown in the corner of his glasses was reading fifteen minutes and dropping, and he was running out of time.
“LT, what’s that thing in the carpark?” Reddy whispered. Dale looked to where the driveway wound off the main road through the cavern. There was an entrance park, where VIP vehicles would pull up and let passengers directly into the main doors. Beside the doors, half hidden behind leaning support pillars and green palm fronds…
“Crap,” said Dale. “That’s an assault walker.” They were very tavalai gear, favoured by the tavalai army for close-quarters urban action. Karasai disliked them, distrusting dumb machines to do a tavalai’s job, so Dale had only seen video, and heard them described by army grunts over a drink in a bar. This one was currently on four legs, though it looked as though it could elevate to two. It was stocky, heavily armoured, and packed at least the usual amount of weaponry — far more firepower than the five attackers combined. “Looks like a chaingun, a heavy repeater, and a grenade launcher, chain fed. Where there’s one, there’ll be more.”
“We’ve fought hacksaw drones,” said Forrest. “We can handle that dumb thing.”
“We fought hacksaw drones in full armour,” Tong reminded him. “LT, we can flank him, right side by the bridge.”
“State Department may be civvies but they’re not stupid,” Dale replied, scanning that way on full magnification. “If they’re using tanks, it means they lack the trained personnel to defend without them. They’ll have had experts set them up, you can bet there’ll be another one covering that crossing down there.”
“We’d be fine if we got inside,” Reddy muttered. “They won’t trash their own house with heavy firepower, and they can’t manoeuvre much inside anyway. It’s just a shitload of open ground to get there.” The mansion ponds and gardens provided cover only forty meters away from the edge of the cane field. One walker, considering them hostile, could kill them all before they’d gone ten. Dale’s timer ticked down to fourteen minutes.
“We don’t have time for a complicated flanking manoeuvre,” Dale decided. “Joker, you can’t access house defences at all?”
“Nothing,” Jokono confirmed. “And trust me — if this technology can’t, nothing can. You have to get inside, then make an inside link to the outside for me to access.”
“LT,” Kadi said breathlessly, “if I can get a direct lasercom on that walker, I can take control of it.” It was more of Styx’s fancy technology that Kadi had brought along. But it was all prototypes when used by humans, and Dale wasn’t about to bet his life on it now.
“If you get lasercom on the walker, you’ll need clear line-of-sight,” he replied. “It’ll kill you the second that happens. Joker…”
“No way!” Kadi insisted. “It’ll work, this is how hacksaw drones take over foreign technology, I’ve seen it work…”
“I said not now!” Dale snapped. “Joker, how about the farming infrastructure? We’ve got lights all along the ceiling, we’ve got water mains through the crops, we’ve got big harvesters sitting idle.”
A pause from Jokono. “Do you want me to turn off the cavern lights?”
“No, those things see real well in the dark. Best option is to overload a programmed AI with too many options — they’re not hacksaws, they’re not sentient, they’re much more easily confused. If you can overload some water mains, make them blow, then turn up the spotlights directly above this guy and dazzle him? Then turn those lights off just as he spots us and tries to aim — he’ll hate the contrast from light to dark, it’ll take more seconds to adjust, and that could be all we need.”
“Yes, I think I can get you that,” said Jokono, sounding a little breathless. “And I think I can get you one of those harvesters, and run it straight at the mansion for distraction from incoming fire, would that help?”
“The harvester on the far side of the mansion?”
“That’s the one.”
“Yep, that’d work fine. What’s its speed? It’ll have to move first, it’ll draw attention away from us.”
“Thus allowing you to see any hidden defences, if that activates them. I believe I can sequence distractions to maximise confusion. Just be sure to run very fast in the shortest line possible. In the meantime, I’ve got you a groundcar, parked quite nearby, neither it nor its owners are aware it’s been breached. That’s your getaway.”
“Not gonna get far if we can’t take out the walker first,” Reddy observed.
“Get me a connection into the mansion,” Jokono said reasonably, “and I may be able to do that too.”
Thirteen minutes, read Dale’s timer. Dammit, he’d cut it real fine… but in some ways this was preferable, a fast fight right on the time limit. If he’d gotten here early, there was every chance State Department would have caught them on withdrawal, and would be holding them right now, or worse. But recapturing them, and the coms module, would take time after the theft. At least this way, they’d still be in possession of it when Tif’s call came through. Even if they got caught eventually, the main mission would still succeed.
“Yo Joker,” Forrest said testily, “I just checked the bugs in my pocket — they’re gone. Looks like they tore a hole in the containment bag.”
“Oh yes, sorry,” said Jokono. “They got out, they’re doing recon for me now, and they’ve got network tricks. They can’t take out a walker or get me network access in the mansion, however.” Jokono had three of Styx’s little synthetic insects that Dale knew of. He’d given Forrest two for this job, and kept one himself, for emergencies.
“I will go first,” came Milek’s translated voice on coms. “I am faster.”
“You’ll come with me and Spots,” said Dale, checking his rifle again — a nervous habit, to keep his hands from shaking. He’d done this so many times, but rarely out of armour. Just like riding a bike, his first sergeant had always said, when Dale was a green private straight from basic. That sergeant had been a twenty year vet with a chest full of medals, and Dale had been in awe of him. Sometimes it didn’t seem real that he was now a thirty year vet with even more medals. He sweated just the same before a fight, and had to find things with which to occupy his hands. “Once inside I want you to recon ahead, eliminate threats, and stay out of our way. Understand?”
“Yes,” Milek agreed. He had a pistol now, and a very big blade that Dale thought he was probably more lethal with. Parren court intrigues and assassins. Probably Milek was one of those — from the small k
not of elite killers that surrounded each feudal lord, killing whom he directed while protecting him from others doing the same. They were experts in hidden weapons and silent murders, not so much in straight-up firefights.
Dale’s timer hit twelve minutes. “Joker, do it.”
With a whine, the big, U-shaped harvester in the far field beyond the mansion began powering up. “I now have a view through one window,” Jokono informed them. “There are tavalai. Several appear armed. There is no way inside, and the security would likely detect the intrusion if there was.”
“No, don’t alarm them yet,” said Dale. “Do you have a view on the communications room?”
“Yes. It’s heavily guarded, I count five more tavalai, doubtless there are more I can’t see.”
“Looks like we’re going to break our promise not to kill tavalai,” Tong observed.
“Good,” said Dale. “Given what State Department pulled on Stoya.” He didn’t know if he meant it or not. After being at war for so long, harsh words and harsh thoughts before a fight were reflex.
The harvester was trundling now, straight toward the mansion. Dale couldn’t see it past the obscuring cane, but he could hear it. Doubtless the mansion’s occupants could hear it too, but probably thought it just regulation farming activity. When it left the cane field and kept heading for the mansion, they’d know something was up.
Dale reached and tapped Reddy on the shoulder, slithered backward from the edge of the cane into deeper cover, then headed right, from where he’d have a shorter run to reach the house. “The harvester is reaching the edge of the field,” said Jokono. “Tell me when you’re making your run.”
“Not yet,” said Dale through gritted teeth, crawling fast between hard cane, trying not to get his rifle caught on the way through.
Kantovan Vault (The Spiral Wars Book 3) Page 33
