VIPER One: Countervalue

One Bravo had an uncomfortable night.

  The gathered UNAF forces spent it trying to breach the safe room. They started by disabling the house’s intrusion countermeasures and taking the neural emitters offline, then hit the safe room with whatever physical methods they could come up with—small arms fire, explosives and tools. They might as well have thrown themselves repeatedly at the door; the place had been built to withstand anything they could lay hands on at short notice. Even their attempts at electronic warfare were fruitless. The safe room had hefty redundancies, and where there was a threat, One Bravo’s Mantix EW capabilities picked up the slack.

  Given time, they could have got in. Given time, they’d have been able to find something big enough, or deployed an EMP-equivalent to short out the whole system and pry it open like a shipping container. Hell, given time, they could have starved them out. But, during the night, the biggest threat to VIPER was boredom.

  It was cramped inside. The room could comfortably accommodate two or three people. Five was pushing it, and the fact that three of them were bulked out by power armour made it almost untenable. The downtime still gave Jarle time to think and plan—except, he couldn’t see a way out. They were penned in. Jinn was managing to hold his ground with the Manticore’s weaponry, despite a few attempts by UNAF. Jarle could call on him for air support, throw the siege party here into disarray long enough for them to break out, but that would doom the Manticore and any way back to One Alpha and the Tannhauser. Vasco and the others were pinned down, too, though in less claustrophobic circumstances. So he spent the long hours of the night waiting for a plan to come to him.

  The enthusiasm of UNAF’s assault blunted in the morning. Maybe it was just exhaustion, or maybe it was fear about the impending provari threat settling; but whatever it was, by first light, the attempts on the safe room had dried up.

  ‘Sarge, are you seeing this?’ Akiya asked on a private channel. They were taking turns, two standing, the rest sitting. After the first few hours, one of them at a time had stripped out of their Mantix in order to increase the tiny amount of space.

  ‘Tell me,’ he sighed. He was exhausted, too, burnt from the Granite and his brain running overdrive, trying to find the angle that he’d missed. A way out.

  ‘Lots of them coughing. A few showing signs of difficulty breathing.’

  Jarle leaned closer to the monitors. He could see it, too. Even on a relative backwater like Ariadne, respiratory sickness was all but eradicated, and it would never spread so virulently. This was something else.

  ‘This isn’t good,’ said Jarle.

  ‘No, Sarge.’

  Jarle checked the van Shels. Victoria’s breathing had been laboured since they’d sealed themselves in, and she’d had the odd coughing fit. He’d ascribed it to the whack she’d taken when he’d grabbed her from outside. She’d been sullen and uncooperative after her abortive attempt to escape, so he hadn’t felt bad about it. Alina had seemed fine, but as he played it back in his head, he could recall her coughing more and more the longer they’d been in here.

  ‘Run a scan on Alina and Victoria. Without tipping them off.’

  Akiya ran a medical scan and patched the results through to Jarle. They were both running serious temperatures.

  Gibbs stood up suddenly. ‘Fuck!’ It was her turn out of her armour, so she yelled out loud. Akiya had spoken to Jarle though a private channel, so Gibbs had missed their exchange. ‘Sarge, have you seen what’s happening outside?’

  Alina looked between them and then at the monitors. ‘What? What’s happening?’

  Jarle cursed himself for not looping in Gibbs. No point hiding it. They wouldn’t be able to keep that information to themselves for long.

  ‘I’ve seen this before,’ she continued, examining the holos, ‘on Tivon. Incubation period of a few days with no signs. Then anyone exposed experiences escalating respiratory problems before their systems just shut down.’

  Alina’s face paled, then flashed with anger. ‘I should never have opened the damned door. You’ve fucking killed us.’

  ‘We’re getting you out of here,’ said Jarle. ‘This is exactly the kind of opportunity we needed.’ He felt a rising sense of nausea, undercutting his relief at seeing a possible way out. If UNAF were suffering here, it was likely that the whole planet had been hit. People would be dying in waves.

  ‘Oh, it’s an opportunity? We could be infected with God knows what and that’s an oppor—’ On cue, her verbal attack descended into coughing.

  Victoria gasped for breath. It took Jarle a moment to realise that she was hyperventilating.

  ‘Put them under,’ he said.

  ‘It’s probably psychosomatic,’ said Akiya. ‘If they’ve been holed up for a while, they might not have been exposed as badly.’

  ‘We don’t know what we’re dealing with. Besides, they’re no good to us like this. Get them under.’

  Akiya slipped a syrette from her belt and grabbed Alina by the shoulder. The woman tried to pull away, but Akiya held her and slipped the needle into her arm. Victoria opened her mouth to scream, but Gibbs was already behind her. The girl went limp in her arms as the Melodoxin took effect.

  ‘Nice work, by the way,’ he said to Gibbs. ‘Very subtle.’

  ‘Sorry, Sarge, I just—’

  ‘Forget about it. Get suited up. Our friends outside aren’t doing so hot, and when they stumble, we need to be ready.’

  The soldiers outside started dying within the hour. Jarle spotted one woman coughing blood into her hands. A short while later, she was on the ground, leaking red from every membrane in her face. She was the first. Others quickly followed. Jarle forced himself to watch. Seeing anyone die like this was rough. That they were wearing UNAF uniforms—traitors or not—made it worse. He kept watching, though, looking for the first moment where he felt sure they could break out.

  ‘All right, One Bravo, this is our last push. We’ve got to get the fuck out of here, clear the skies and get airborne, and we’ve got to carry these two with us while we do it. Here’s how we’re going to play it.’ He jabbed a thumb at the screen. ‘These assholes don’t have a lot of fight left in them. Whatever bioweapon’s been put into the air out there, they’re hurting bad. We should be able to punch through and get outside, no sweat, and we’ll break for the hole we made in the compound wall on the way in.

  ‘We’ve got to assume the Harlequin’s still in play. They might have retasked it, but we can’t make that assumption. With this virus disrupting UNAF, it should be running in autonomous mode. That’s good. We get drones up as soon as we’re out and trigger a deadzone here.’ He marked a spot on their maps, a section behind the houses.

  ‘Why there?’ asked Gibbs. ‘Aren’t we hauling ass in the other direction?’

  ‘Exactly. When I was grabbing Victoria, the tank started taking pot shots into the deadzone. Seems like, if it doesn’t have an actual target, it’ll take a best guess. It’s not foolproof, but it might draw it off long enough for us to get clear. If it doesn’t work, all bets are off. We may have to take that thing down to get clear of the compound. We get out of here, we should be off to a walk in the park. I don’t think that emplacement is going to have a lot of fight left in it when we get back for round two.’

  ‘Gotta say, Sarge,’ Gibbs checked her railgun. ‘I thought this whole op was going to be a milk run. Picking up some VIP assholes and dragging them offworld. I thought wrong.’

  ‘Welcome to VIPER, Gibbs,’ Jarle grinned. ‘Now let’s get this shit done.’

  The squad activated refrac. Gibbs triggered the door. The scattered UNAF troops that remained vaguely ready to fight staggered to their feet, bringing their weapons to bear. One Bravo took them down with a few well-placed shots.

  ‘Drones up.’

  They each pulled the miniature drone they carried on their belts and let them go. They hovered for a moment, then shot off, pinpointing the fastest egress from the house where they could get higher and provide better
coverage.

  ‘Getting a signal,’ said Akiya. ‘Yep, tank’s still here.’

  ‘Deadzone, go.’

  ‘It’s taking the bait!’

  Gibbs hauled Alina and Victoria up on her shoulders, and One Bravo sprinted out of the house, heading for the gap in the wall.

  ‘Ah, shit, it’s turning back! It must have a read on the warm bodies.’ The sound of data chatter filled the comlink as the Harlequin bombarded them with LRIS.

  ‘Keep going!’

  They were almost at the gap when the first wave of cannon fire came. The tank could only read the unshielded bodies of Alina and Victoria. Gibbs threw herself forwards, hauling all three of them out of the way. She landed hard, and even over the cannon fire, Jarle’s audio sensors picked up the crunch of bone as Gibbs collapsed Alina’s ribcage.

  Jarle didn’t think. He turned and put a few rounds into the front armour of the Harlequin. The tank reprioritised the active threat. It hadn’t broken his refrac yet, but it could still pinpoint him from the trajectory of his fire.

  He threw himself to the right as the tank ploughed a trench in the ground where he’d been standing. He fired again.

  ‘Gibbs, get them clear. Akiya—try and hit the sensors.’

  He didn’t look to see if they’d followed his instructions. He just kept the rhythm. Fire and move. Fire and move. Always just ahead of its targeting software. Never by far enough. Humans were inherently predictable. Even if his refrac held up, it would nail him soon.

  ‘Akiya!’

  Her APR lanced out, sending up an orange flare from one of the Harlequin’s main sensor banks. It wouldn’t blind it, but it would sure as hell throw off its targeting for precious seconds. He checked for Gibbs. She was clear of the compound, which meant he could stop laying down leading fire.

  He silenced the alarm blaring in his ears. They had about ten seconds before LRIS broke through their refrac.

  ‘Akiya, I need you to get behind it,’ he said, running diagnostics. The APR, being a directed-energy weapon, was the only thing remotely capable of penetrating the Harlequin’s armour. ‘Hit the plasmastats.’

  She was sprinting before he’d finished giving the order. Jarle took his time lining up his shot, then put a burst of tungsten into another sensor cluster. As the cannons lit up again, he breathed, forcing himself to stay still.

  ‘Come on, Akiya,’ he grunted.

  The cannons cut a line around him, a diagonal path that cleared him by ten centimetres. The fried sensors were throwing it off. If he’d leapt aside, he’d have just put himself into the line of fire. He whooped involuntarily.

  Akiya’s APR fired twice, and the Harlequin jounced wildly, a strange thrash as its systems fought to compensate for its two lost plasmastats. But there was nothing it could do. In seconds the thing was powering down, broadcasting an automated distress call on the wideband.

  Jarle grinned inside his helmet. ‘Gibbs, Harlequin is down. Sitrep?’

  ‘I’m good, Sarge. I’ve reinflated Alina’s lungs as much as I can, but she’s in bad shape. We need to get her into storage. If she wakes up and panics, she might kill herself just trying to breathe.’

  ‘We need to get them all to storage, ASAP. Whatever this agent is, it’s working fast. Let’s go.’

  The city was in chaos. The onset of the bioweapon’s effects had thrown UNAF into disarray, and their clear-streets policy had fallen apart. Confused civilians—the few that hadn’t yet succumbed to the effects of the virus bomb—staggered through the streets, confused, lost and afraid, amid the bodies. And there were bodies everywhere, UNAF and civilian alike, piled thick.

  ‘Fuck,’ said Akiya.

  ‘Can the chatter,’ Jarle said. He dialled in Vasco on the team band. ‘Cap, it’s me.’

  ‘Christ, Jarle, you do not want to know what I’m looking at right now,’ Vasco said.

  ‘I think I can guess.’

  ‘We’ve been hit. Must have been the cobs. Viral loads, high-altitude airburst.’

  ‘That’s what I’m thinking.’

  ‘Sergeant, for God’s sake tell me you’re en route,’ Vasco said. ‘We need dustoff ASAP, or we’re looking at CMF.’

  CMF. Critical Mission Failure. Jarle gritted his teeth. ‘We’re coming, Sir. Mikes two and three secure. I want to be in the air inside twenty minutes. ETA Theseus one hour tops.’

  ‘Do they have it? Do your targets have the virus?’

  Jarle clenched his hands. ‘Yes, sir, they have it.’

  ‘Shit. Just… be as fast as you can, all right? I’m not taking six corpses back to Vargonroth.’

  ‘I’m working on it, Captain.’

  ‘I know you are. Good luck.’

  ‘Copy. Jarle out.’

  He terminated the link and cursed into his helmet. He had to hold it together, for the sake of everyone here. They’d known the people on Ariadne were dead, they’d known it before they’d landed. But this, seeing the devastation all around them, was so much worse. The provar hadn’t had to fire a shot. He was glad they’d put the van Shels out. They didn’t need to see this.

  ‘Jinn, we’ll be with you soon. I need you to monitor Burrow’s condition. The planet’s been hit with some kind of bioweapon.’

  They made quick progress through the streets of Minos. All that stood in their way was bodies. When they reached the emplacement, the door was open. A man and a woman in UNAF garb were sprawled over the desks in the field office, dead from the virus that was killing Ariadne.

  ‘Akiya, get this cannon offline and let’s get the fuck off this hellhole,’ Jarle sighed. He leaned back against one of the desks.

  ‘Sarge, I’m reading clear skies. That you?’

  ‘That’s us. Zero in on our location, and let’s get back to the captain.’

  This day couldn’t end soon enough.