It was late afternoon in Espa when the V14 Manticore gunship put them down two klicks south of the UN exclusion zone. The hold door hissed open as the seal disconnected, and hot, rank air filled the hold as if someone had opened the hatch to a furnace. A mixture of smells filtered through Captain Vasco’s Mantix rebreather as he jumped on to the boggy earth—warm exhaust fumes, stagnant water, decaying vegetation—and in the distance he could hear the rolling boom of thunder echoing through the sky.
No, not thunder. Artillery.
Sergeant Jarle snapped a recon drone from his webbing and tossed it into the air. Behind him, the team exited the Manticore and fanned out into a rough circle, weapons up, completing their post-debarkation manoeuvres while the drone data populated their HUDs.
Vasco studied the three-dimensional topographic display for a few seconds, cycling between VL, infrared and thermal, before settling on enhanced tactical. There was nothing—at least, nothing that the drone could detect. No provar. No area denial weaponry. Just the local fauna, vaguely bemused by the arrival of the Manticore, but quite content to continue munching on the grass. They’d seen enough machines of war in the last few weeks to be too troubled by this one.
‘Anyone got anything?’ Vasco asked over the wideband as the sound of the Manticore’s engines died away.
A chorus of negatives answered him. Jarle walked up to where Vasco was standing, and surveyed the land ahead.
‘There,’ Vasco said, pointing to a distant flash, twenty klicks away by the rangefinder on his HUD. ‘Must be the 1160th.’
Jarle grunted. ‘Must be.’
They were standing in the middle of a tropical marshland, a vast, boggy plain of green grass, red-brown mud, and sun-silvered sheets of water. Ahead, thirty klicks away, the UN colony of Espa sat under a pellucid shield dome, framed in gold by the late afternoon sun. South of it was the main UNAF force, a ragtag collection of units from the 181st Voga Highlanders, 57th Bospen Mechanised, and 6th Battalion UN Marines. On the gun line was the 1160th UN Artillery Regiment, its 200mm rail cannons currently testing the shields over the city.
Vasco checked the mission timer and his IHD to see if any new intel had come in from their UNIS attaché since they’d made planetfall. It hadn’t. Nothing had changed. As far as JIC was concerned, Vaughn Almeida was still being held in Espa.
And Espa was still being held by the provar.
He turned to the Manticore. Behind the diamond-reinforced cockpit window, their SPECWAR pilot gave him a thumbs-up. ‘All clear from where I’m sitting,’ he said, his voice tinny over the comlink.
Vasco nodded. ‘Stay on comms. I don’t think we’ll need more than two days.’
‘You got it.’
Vasco squinted at the horizon and watched the distant, pinprick flashes of the big UN guns. ‘All right, VIPER,’ he said over the wideband. ‘Let’s move out. Kgosi take point.’
The team fell in to a staggered line, with fifty metres between the point man, Corporal Kgosi, and Trooper Akiya at the rear with her assault plasma rifle. Vasco stayed in the centre, with Lukas “Sev” Severine on close protection and comms detail with the stubby magma pulse. Sergeant Jarle and the team’s marksman, “Range” Burnett, took the second and second-last slots.
They moved north through the swampland quickly and quietly, their Mantix boots sinking deep into the soft, cake-like earth. Even though it was late in the afternoon, the heat from the sun was punishing. Not for the first time in his career Vasco found himself grateful for his Mantix’s inbuilt cooling system.
‘Think the UNAF boys’ll let us through?’ Sev asked over the wideband after five minutes of silence.
‘No fucking chance,’ Kgosi snapped.
‘They’ll let us through,’ Vasco said calmly, though he wasn’t sure he believed it. Their mandate was about as wide as it could have been, and Vasco carried impeccable executive authority credentials from the highest echelons of Joint Intelligence Command. In theory it should have got them anywhere in the galaxy, even at the height of hostilities with the Ascendancy. In practice, every UNAF officer from second lieutenant up was itching at the chance to shut them out of their theatre of operations.
‘I say we go in full refrac. Don’t even tell them we’re coming. Extract Almeida and bug out before they even know we were there,’ Kgosi continued, warming to his theme. ‘I’m not having some fat fuck colonel from Chesterhorst tell me it’s too dangerous again. Fuck that guy.’
It was tempting. Their Mantix suits, unlike those of the vast majority of their UNAF comrades, were capable of refraction shielding—that was to say, rendering them invisible. But on a mission like this, with battalions of tightly-wound UN soldiers with big guns and itchy trigger fingers standing between them and their target, it was suicidal. One anomaly, one blip on a reconnaissance drone running LRIS saturation, and they’d all be pulverised by their own side.
‘What was his name?’ Kgosi pressed between bouts of grumbling.
‘Eisenhofer,’ Sev replied when no-one else volunteered the information. The big man was more tolerant of Kgosi’s vitriol than the rest of the team. ‘Vargan Rifles, wasn’t he?’
‘Yeah, some prissy Veigis bitch.’
‘Can it, you rock-sucking, freeporting Oscar Romeo scumbag,’ Jarle growled. ‘Watch point, before some REMF cob lights you up.’
Kgosi fell silent, wilting under the force of the sergeant’s ire, but the heat of his temper was as powerful as the tropical air around them. Kgosi was an irritating man, there was no doubt about that, and JIC had warned Vasco that the corporal was unstable before he’d recruited him to VIPER. Still; he’d yet to see a braver and more loyal trooper under fire.
They pressed on, their boots sucking into the stinking mud, sloshing through lakes of shin-high water, and rustling through kilometres of savannah as they followed a series of HUD markers set by Jarle’s reconnaissance drone. The sun sank lower in the sky, and the air filled with slate-dark thunderclouds. It wasn’t long before the sky started booming with thunder, drowning out the distant UN guns.
‘Monsoon season,’ Vasco remarked idly, his eyes on the clouds. At his request, the recon drone provided him with a meteorological report for the next six hours. He studied the kaleidoscopic swirl of colours on his HUD, a heatmap of convective currents that told him one thing: there was a storm coming.
‘We in for some weather?’ Sev asked him.
‘We’re in for some weather,’ Vasco confirmed. ‘K; let’s pick up the pace.’
‘You got it, Chief,’ Kgosi replied, and broke into a jog.
It didn’t take long for the clouds to burst. The sun was gone, swallowed by the thunderhead, and the evening quickly turned to twilight. The rain was torrential, an impenetrable sheet of water so thick that Vasco had to dial up the sensitivity of his visor. It took them another twenty minutes to reach the rearmost UN position. Their suits were broadcasting friendly IFF codes, but UN electronic warfare pods still battered them with waves of long-range invasive scans so intense they were going to give them all cancer. Vasco was right; the UN forces here were jittery.
He moved to the head of the squad, now that they were well within the exclusion zone. Around them, the landscape was littered with olive-green prefab modules dropped from orbit, canvas marquees, stacks of crates of supplies and ammunition, and the general mass of high-tech junk that accrued wherever UNAF went on operations. Ten klicks away, the massed towers of Espa jutted into the sky, great grey pillars once wreathed in advertising holos and now ominously dark. On enhanced optics, Vasco could just about make it out through the sheets of rain and the domed force shield.
They had reached the UN gun line, a shallow semicircle of 200mm DSF-80 rail cannons currently harassing the shields over the city. Each one fired from an entrenched gun pit guarded by diamond-reinforced flak boards and draped with piles of camouflage netting. Given that they were 80% human redundant, their UNAF operators—a pair of bored-looking gunners for each—did li
ttle except plug in the grids they wanted destroyed, then sit back and let the inbuilt VIs take care of the rest.
‘Trooper,’ Vasco called out to a passing gunner. ‘I’m looking for Colonel Holbourn.’
‘OC’s in the ops room, five klicks north,’ the man replied guardedly. His caginess was understandable. On Vasco’s HUD, the gunner’s name, rank and regiment appeared in turquoise lettering above his head, and he had a faint green outline with the word FRIENDLY superimposed over him. To the gunner, Vasco would appear in green outline—but that was it. The reason for this otherwise inconvenient subterfuge was simple: the UN defence network was not infallible. If Ascendancy SIGINT codebreakers hacked the net and discovered the presence of VIPER on-world, they’d execute their prisoner. They’d learnt that the hard way.
‘Can you give me a marker?’ Vasco asked.
‘Yeah,’ the gunner replied, and a blue chevron appeared on Vasco’s HUD.
‘Yes, sir,’ Jarle snapped angrily, striding up to the trooper so that their helmets were nearly touching.
‘Yes, sir!’ the trooper spluttered in a mixture of insolence and fear.
Vasco’s visor concealed his discomfort. Jarle could be… zealous. ‘Thank you,’ he said to the gunner. The man disappeared into the rain. Vasco sent the marker to the rest of the squad. ‘Come on,’ he said.
They pressed north, leaving the gun line and jogging through another few klicks of marshland before coming across further signs of urban civilisation—roads, trackways, plains of overgrown concrete and dilapidated, abandoned buildings. Here military transports and APCs lumbered through the twilight down freshly metalled roads, halogen beams on full. A few Manticores buzzed overhead, surrounded by clouds of recon and rapid intervention drones. Prefab military installations began to appear, barracks and canteens and logistical centres all bristling with antenna arrays. A field hospital with a large red cross painted on the side dominated the skyline to the east.
It took them thirty minutes to reach the command centre, a requisitioned red-brick mansion set within expansive grounds five klicks from the city limits. The area was teeming with troops and awash with the light from naval-grade lamps. Three Harlequin tanks from the 57th Bospen Mechanised stood in a makeshift hangar to the west being fussed over by ordnance loaders and engineers. To the north, gun emplacements and whirling, voidar-guided missile silos sat in entrenched hard points.
The squad pulled up short outside the command centre. The grass around them had been trampled to a slick mudscape, and wet wooden boards groaned under the weight of exoskeletons coming and going.
‘See if you can make yourselves useful up front,’ Vasco said to the squad. He nodded to the command centre. ‘I have a feeling this is going to take a while.’