The building was bustling with military personnel. The furniture in every room, much of it antique and undoubtedly expensive, had been stacked in piles in the corners and covered in dust sheets, replaced by crates of hardware, banks of consoles and hundreds of holo generators displaying feeds from a crop of recon drones circling over Espa. In what looked to have been the sitting room sat three large plasmastat power generators, quietly humming at the head of a jungle of triple-redundancy cabling. With the power out, each room had been fixed with temporary lighting.
Vasco removed his helmet and walked purposefully through the press of personnel. The air was rife with the smell of wet armour, unwashed troopers and fresh mud. The carpets and rugs, plush, colourful and ancient, were crusted with mud tramped in by dozens of UNAF, Fleet and marine personnel.
Vasco headed upstairs and made for a door with a pair of sentries standing outside.
‘Looking for OC Theatre,’ he said to the closest.
There was a pause. ‘Creds?’ the trooper replied after his scan of Vasco didn’t turn up anything useful.
Vasco obliged the man, and sent him his JIC credentials.
‘All right, sir. Colonel Holbourn is inside.’ The sentry pulled the door open, and Vasco went in.
What had been an animated conversation immediately died. Seven pairs of eyes locked on to him, men and women clad in a variety of Mantix suits already bearing the scars of combat. Vasco’s IHD provided names for all of them, and ranks and regiments. It was an actuals brief, a meeting of all of the senior theatre commanders.
‘Yes?’ Colonel Holbourn asked, the officer commanding the 181st Voga Highlanders. He was a grim-looking man, stout and with cropped grey hair. His forehead was marked with dried blood and a bright green nanogel medical package the size of a thumb.
‘Captain Vasco, OC VIPER One,’ he said, saluting smartly.
Holbourn returned it, but he looked confused. ‘Never heard of VIPER. What outfit are you, SPECWAR?’
‘EFFECT,’ Vasco replied, ‘though I daresay we’ll become cross-agency soon enough.’
‘VIP Recovery,’ another man remarked, the spectacularly moustached Major Singh of the 57th Mechanised. ‘I’d heard rumours they were putting together a special unit. Didn’t know it had been done.’
‘Very much in the prototype stages,’ Vasco said. ‘This is our second op.’
‘And how did the first one go?’ Singh asked.
Vasco faltered. ‘Not as planned,’ he said eventually.
There were a few seconds of silence.
‘I’m afraid we’re in the middle of a briefing,’ Holbourn said after a short while, not particularly apologetically. ‘Can it wait?’
Vasco cleared his throat. ‘Actually, my orders may dovetail with yours, Colonel. It would certainly be helpful to hear the plan of attack. Dawn raid, is it?’
Holbourn and Singh exchanged a glance. Overhead, the keening shriek of outgoing artillery split the sky, followed by a sharp snap as the shield dome rejected the shell. The rain was lightening off, and spears of red light were slanting through the clouds again, the sun’s last throw of the dice before dusk. It had the effect of making the clouds look even blacker.
‘Show me your orders,’ Holbourn said after a while, and Vasco once again transmitted his warrant of executive authority from the head of EFFECT, Fiona Tavistock. It took the colonel a moment to finish reading them. He grunted. ‘All right,’ he said, unhappy. ‘Berman.’
A pale, lanky man at the head of the table nodded, the officer commanding the UN 62nd Electronic Warfare (Support) Battalion. Holo screens reactivated and populated with data and graphics. ‘We’ve knocked out their FTL arrays and we’re running codebreakers on any dumb comms. They’re certainly broadcasting for help, but thanks to our blanket containment none of it is getting out.’
‘Do they have any electronic warfare capability?’ the OC of the 6th Battalion Marines, Captain Milovan, asked.
Berman nodded. ‘They do. Sectors gamma, delta and epsilon are all deadzoned. We’ve got recon drones running LRIS saturation at the moment to try and penetrate, but the interference from the shield is already severe.’
‘Orbital recon suggests the shield generator is in sector gamma,’ the Fleet attaché, First Officer Corradino said, pointing to a highlighted area on a map of the city. Her ship, the flank defence cruiser UNS Phoenix of the 5th Fleet 1st Solar Operations Group, was currently sitting in orbit a thousand kilometres above them. It was the only Fleet ship assigned to Iepthae, the planet on which they were all standing.
Attention swivelled to the Fleet woman. ‘The provar did not bring the shield generator, it was already in Espa,’ Holbourn said. ‘Surely we simply consult the city schematics?’
Now Berman shook his head. ‘No. We think it’s been moved too. The telemetry from gamma is consistent with heavy power usage and concentrated EXM discharge.’
Holbourn was silent for a moment. He tapped his lips with a gauntleted finger. ‘If you’re wrong,’ he said, then paused, frowning. ‘Can it even be moved?’
‘Certainly not impossible with the technical knowhow and some heavy machinery,’ Berman said.
‘Speaking of which, what’s the latest on their armour?’ Holbourn asked.
‘Low-tech. Some self-propelled guns, some ALR-50s,’ Singh said, turning to Corradino, who nodded to confirm. ‘We knocked out most of their armour last week. No reason to think there’s any in the city that wasn’t in the field.’
Holbourn grunted. ‘All of your Harlequins operational?’
Singh nodded. The UN’s main ground-based battle tank, the Harlequin, was a remote-operated, semiautonomous vehicle less powerful and manoeuvrable than the Goliath, but considerably cheaper and comparatively expendable.
‘Do we know where those cob guns are?’
‘Sector theta,’ Ivo said, the officer commanding the 1160th Artillery Regiment. ‘We’ve had them painted for thirty hours. Second that shield’s down, we’ll light ‘em up.’
They were silent for the moment. Unexpectedly, Holbourn turned to Vasco. ‘All right, Captain; where does your team fit into all of this? Who’s your objective?’
Vasco cleared his throat. He took a step forward so that he was closer to the table, and highlighted an area of the holomap in red. Next to it, a portrait of a handsome middle-aged man appeared, a stock photo from the United Nations Diplomatic Ministry.
‘Vaughn Almeida,’ Vasco said. ‘Xeno Division diplomat. Was working on Oberon Minor with a legation of golgron on the Perseus Ore Belt dispute. He was abducted by quorl last week from the Kestigar City Hotel, and traced here by our UNIS friends.’
‘Roster job?’
Vasco nodded. The Ascendancy Roster was a list of senior coalition military, political and diplomatic figures that the provar had marked for death. Anyone who was able to kill or capture anyone on the list was in for a healthy reward. News of the existence of the Roster had spread like wildfire, and it had done more to spread fear throughout the UN then a dozen orbital bombardments. When it came to psychological warfare, the provar were lightyears ahead.
‘What’s your plan of attack?’ Vasco asked Holbourn.
‘We’re going to hit them just before first light,’ the colonel replied. ‘Two main prongs from the south—four companies from the 181st in each—and a third, the marines, from the east. 6 Battalion will head for gamma sector and deactivate the shield generator. Guns’ll pound the northern sectors up to and including the space port.’
Vasco studied the map. The space port was in sector epsilon—exactly where Almeida was being held. ‘You’re not going to hit them with rail? LOAS?’ he asked.
Holbourn shook his head, but it was Corradino who answered. ‘We don’t have LOAS capability. Not with the Phoenix.’
LOAS—low orbit artillery support. Naval rail guns high above could strike targets with laserpoint accuracy. It was considerably more effective and caused less collateral damage than Ivo’s DSF-80s would. Vasco w
orked over the timing in his head. ‘How long after the shield is down will the bombardment start?’
‘Immediately,’ Ivo and Holbourn said simultaneously.
‘You’ll kill my man,’ Vasco protested.
Holbourn shrugged. ‘So get him before.’
‘How is 6 Battalion getting to the shield generator? Air cav?’
The only person who hadn’t yet spoken, a woman in an armoured flight suit and brown leather bomber jacket, shook her head. The IHD marker above her head identified her as the CO of the 281st Air Cavalry, Liz Mayhew. ‘Too dangerous with the shield dome up. Not enough clearance between tops of those buildings and the shield above. Maybe for a straight-line, by-the-numbers flight, but with the amount of flak that’s going to be knocking about, it’s a no go.’
‘On foot, in other words,’ Milovan said dourly, obviously irritated that his marines were going to be so exposed.
Vasco wracked his brain. There were a thousand variables, each unknown. If they went in ahead of the main assault, they could find themselves cut off and at the mercy of a thousand provar. If they waited for the attack, it could provide the perfect cover—but the aliens might just execute Almeida immediately. If they waited until after the shield had been taken down, Almeida, along with all the provar within two klicks of him, would be hacking up their own lungs from artillery overpressure.
‘That doesn’t leave me with many options,’ he said eventually, more to himself than the assembled officers.
‘I’m sorry, Captain,’ Holbourn said, ‘but your man isn’t the only one in this city. There are thousands of UN civilians holed up in those towers, with no power, no running water and no food. Can’t put off an assault for one HVT.’
Vasco nodded. ‘Of course,’ he said, and it made complete sense. He had his orders, Holbourn had his.
‘Do what you have to do,’ Holbourn said reasonably, ‘I won’t stop you. But our timetable is inflexible, and the bombardment will go ahead the second that shield is down—even if you’re slap-bang in the middle of it.’
Vasco nodded absently, his eyes fixed on the slowly rotating holomap. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’ll have some callsigns sent to you. We have our own air south of here too, just outside the exclusion zone.’
‘We know,’ Berman said.
Vasco nodded again. ‘Colonel: thank you for your time.’
‘Good hunting, Captain,’ Holbourn replied, and they shook hands.
The second Vasco was out the door, he began running.