Vasco awoke in his VR capsule as the last of the nanogel matrix was being sucked out. The meeting had lasted seconds of real time. He de-harnessed and punched the door release, and floated out into the Tannhauser’s debarkation hold.
The rest of the team was waiting for him: Jarle, VIPER’s sergeant; Lukas “Sev” Severine, their heavy weapons man; Corporal Kgosi; Akiya, their APR gunner; and the new sharpshooter, Jada Gibbs, “Range” Burnett’s replacement. They were all armed and armoured, helmets off, floating in front of the Manticore gunship. The pilot, Jinn, with the help of the voidbreaker’s VI, was performing pre-ROI checks in the background.
‘All right, listen in,’ Vasco said, gripping one of the grab hoops bolted to the roof. He paused, tried to hold down a coughing fit, and failed. The scarring he’d suffered to his lungs on Iepthae meant that they regularly collected fluid. Implanted drug secretors and nanobots cleared most—but not all of it. He was due a replacement, vat-grown set; until then, his old ones would have to do.
‘You OK, Chief?’ Akiya asked.
Vasco waved her off. ‘I’m fine.’ He sucked in a few breaths of stale, recycled voidbreaker air. He paused. No more coughs. ‘Bad news. Ariadne has been cold-shouldered. They’re dressing it up as “strategic sacrifice”, but basically Sector Command has higher priorities. That means no Fleet or UNAF support at all.’
‘This is—’
‘Keep a lid on it, Corporal,’ Jarle snapped, heading off Kgosi’s outburst. Both the sergeant and corporal were Outer Ring, and carried their own prejudices; but Jarle, staunch defender of the UN and career solider, was too professional to let his show. The man was gunning for warrant officer after all, and the big green UNAF machine promoted grinders, not whiners.
‘I know,’ Vasco said, holding up a hand. Being a Beta Thanian gave him sufficient credibility in matters of social class to not provoke a personal jab. ‘It is what it is. Welcome to war. I don’t intend to be round long enough for it to be a problem for us.’
Kgosi tsk’ed at that.
‘K, enough,’ Vasco warned.
‘It’s bullshit, sir,’ Kgosi muttered. ‘Can bet your ass if it was some Victor-Whisky world, Fleet’d be crawling up its ass to defend it.’
‘Did that danger-close in Espa fuck your eardrums, Corporal? Cap’ said enough!’ Jarle growled, a hairsbreadth short of physical violence.
‘Kgosi, no-one’s happy about it,’ Vasco said, feeling his temper rise. He caught the look of Gibbs’ disdain. ‘Can I continue?’
Silence seized the hold. Vasco didn’t get angry with the team often, and the threat of it alone was enough to shut Kgosi up.
‘SPECTRECOM lost en’Jago over in the Vadians, so I want to be in and out as quickly as possible,’ Vasco said. ‘DSRs have picked up nothing that we know of, which gives us six clear hours to recover our targets and get out. Anything beyond six hours and we’re on borrowed time. We can expect Ascendancy SIGINT to realise that Ariadne is undefended any time in the next day or two, which makes it a nice fat target. I don’t want to be planetside when the cobs pitch up, destroy the Tannhauser, and leave us all to get blitzed from orbit. So, as usual, speed is the name of the game, understood?’
‘Sir,’ came the chorus of replies.
‘Couldn’t they have just lied?’ Gibbs asked. There was a pause. Everyone turned to look at her.
‘Couldn’t they have just lied, Sir,’ Jarle corrected.
Gibbs all but rolled her eyes. ‘Sir?’
Gibbs was an Outer Ringer too, Irene’s World, like Jarle, though from different colonies. According to Sev, Special Warfare Division had been all too happy to punt her to VIPER. Apparently she had a reputation for… something, though even Sev’s intel didn’t stretch that far. It wasn’t surprising; SPECWAR was the most deniable, siloed collection of psychopathic filibusters in UNSOC’s arsenal. Frankly, whatever it was, if it was too rich for SPECWAR’s blood, he didn’t want to know about it.
‘Sector Command?’ Vasco asked, indulging her. ‘To Ariadne?’
Gibbs nodded once.
‘I imagine they will have left that to the Governor,’ Vasco replied.
Gibbs said nothing. Vasco hoped she wasn’t going to be a problem. From Chadwick’s briefing, Gibbs clearly thought VIPER was beneath her. Lifting civs from an uncontested world was hardly back-breaking work, but all the same, he wouldn’t tolerate complacency.
He consulted their list of targets. There were seven, four in Theseus and three in Minos. He’d already reviewed the operations order. The mission plan would be straightforward.
‘Right. I’m going to split the team for this op,’ he said. ‘Once we’ve put down in Theseus, Sergeant I want you to take Akiya and Gibbs to Minos in the Manticore, callsign VIPER One Bravo. You’ve got… Carl Burrow, resident mining magnate, and Alina van Shel and her daughter, Victoria. You’ve full discretion on how to proceed. Also…’ He paused, scanning the latest addenda to their mission brief ‘…apparently it’s the winter solstice in Minos and there’s some kind of local festival going on. That’ll make getting around a little tricky, so use your judgement.’
‘Understood,’ Jarle said.
‘Sev, K, you’re both with me. We’ve got the big hitters, the Governor, chief of staff, the ranking UNAF general and a zhahassi trade legate. I only anticipate problems with the former. Yashego’s got a hard-on for Ariadne and he’s bursting for a chance to prove it.’ He considered the briefing notes, checking for anything else he wanted to go through. ‘We’ll cover the rest of it en route.’ He cancelled the dossier from his vision. Behind the team, Jinn gave the thumbs-up.
‘All right,’ he said, looking at each of them. ‘You’ve all read the briefing so I won’t labour the point, but the situation planetside is unstable. Ariadne has a long history of sedition against the UN. News that they won’t be defended—if and when that breaks—is going to turn the situation into a shitshow at lightspeed. That means that anything with a U and an N printed on it is going to become a hard target. Now, I don’t want you punching civ tickets with tungsten if you can avoid it, but I’m not getting fucked around either. You all know the law—anyone interfering with ops in your AO is fair game. Anyone takes a shot at you, you put one in their lid no questions asked. Like I said, speed, speed, speed. Command leaked us that flash for a good reason, we’ve no excuses not to use it. Understood?’
‘Sir,’ came the chorus of replies.
‘There are local UNAF forces. Local UN Governorate records suggest nearly three quarters of these are defence-station reservists. They have very limited armour and their electronic warfare capability is almost non-existent. Just be aware that most of the UNAF forces on-world are local volunteers, not central UNSOC-appointed forces on rotation. That means their loyalty is in question. Our wonderful modern technology means that even a fourteen year-old village idiot can land accurate railgun fire from a couple of klicks, so don’t underestimate them. Just be sensible, all right?’
‘Sir.’
‘Good. We’re going to ROI in ten minutes, so get squared away. Any target gives you grief, you bag’em and tag’em, got it? I’m not hanging around because Johnny Councillor wants his wife and children to come with him.’
‘We’re not bringing families?’ K asked with characteristic intensity.
‘No, we are not bringing families, for no other reason than we have nowhere to fit them all and I don’t want human jam lining the holds when we have to bug out at point-five lights.’
‘Isn’t that going to be difficult?’ Akiya asked. ‘I mean, to get the targets to come with us? Shit, I wouldn’t leave my family behind, even if it meant certain death.’
Vasco forced himself to shrug. In truth, he felt the same way, but the burden of command meant he often had to be an emotionless robot for the benefit of the team.
‘The UN has decided that these individuals are more useful to the war effort alive than dead. And they are named on the Roster, which means they are marked for death. I
f anything, by removing them from their families, we are making their families safer.’
‘But sir—’
Vasco held up a hand, and got silence. ‘Listen in, VIPER: some targets will resist. They will scream and cry and beg to be left with their husbands and wives and kids. We do not care. We are not in the business of feeling good about ourselves, we’re in the business of saving the lives of the UN’s best and brightest. We’ve all got to start thinking in terms of humanity’s survival. Think about it: what if we land and Governor Yashego wants to stay? What if he wants to go down with the ship like the proud Ariadnian fucker he is? And we leave him there, and the provar arrive, and they torture him, and hey-fucking-presto, highly-sensitive intelligence on Fleet movements in the sector fall into enemy hands. Now we’ve lost five colonies rather than one because we were sentimental. It’s as simple as that.’ He looked each of them in the eye; Akiya, uneasy, Kgosi pissed off, Sev and Jarle resolved, Gibbs impassive. ‘We go in, we get the job done, and we bug out. Clear?’
‘Yes, sir!’
‘Good.’ He paused. ‘Is everyone up to date on their countervirals?’
There was an anxious pause. ‘Sir,’ came the eventual response. Even in this time of total war, of legitimised civilian targets and mass colonial casualties, the thought of a viral attack still set their flesh to crawling. Under the Tier Three War Accords, such tactics were banned; but after a month of war, it was clear the Accords weren’t worth shit.
‘OK.’ He chided himself inwardly. He shouldn’t have ended on talk of biological warfare. Too late now. ‘Let’s move out.’