Another minute ticked by and Gomez activated his command link. “All units, this is Alpha Six. If package not in sight in five minutes, we are Buster. Repeat: if package not in sight in five minutes, we are Buster.” Buster was the codename for the contingency plan and they all knew it was a pretty desperate undertaking.
He really—really—wanted those grenades.
The grenades were not for them—they were bait. Bait intended for a terrorist warlord named Nestor Mankho, asleep in the walled compound three klicks down the slope and across the open flat below. Mankho had been behind a terrorist plot he called the Alecto Initiative: an attempt to bomb a series of high-profile Grand Senate hearings in Nemeton last year. It had almost succeeded; Nedaema came literally within a centimeter of having its government virtually wiped out. It was the first operation Mankho had mounted since the Black Army, an anarchist group he’d once led, had been practically annihilated after they attacked the Nedaeman colony of Knydos in the first years after the last war.
Mankho had survived the destruction of the Black Army and spent the intervening years smuggling weapons, dealing in slaves, investing in a few legit businesses (including the popular social-networking service Zeta that it was believed he used to ID targets for his slaving operations), and eluding capture. Up until just before the attempted bombing, the conventional wisdom had him knocking about in the Outworlds, but then the League’s Office of Naval Intelligence had located him here on Lacaille, a Bannerman client in the Hydra, which lay between Halith and Bannerman space.
Current intelligence estimates held that Mankho didn’t have the resources to mount such an involved operation on his own—a conclusion supported by forensics—and the consensus among those in the know was that Mankho had been working for someone else. The Dominion of Halith seemed the most likely someone, but this ‘suspicion’ (as the Archon of Nedaema insisted it be referred to) could easily tip the strained relations with Halith into another war, so it could not be entertained in any official sense without absolute proof.
The absolute proof was Mankho himself, alive if possible, so the information could be more readily extracted. If taking him alive was not an option, it was necessary to acquire his well-preserved brain. Simply killing Mankho no longer served a useful purpose, so this operation had been planned with meticulous care: NDIA had gone to extraordinary lengths to check and recheck their intelligence, the trap had been painstakingly laid using perfectly reliable, perfectly unwitting contacts and set with an irresistible bait: a shipment of second-gen adaptive grenades.
The shipment was genuine. Gomez knew it had cleared customs at Kapustin Yar, Lacaille’s main starport, right on schedule, concealed in drums of high-density superconductive oil that was used in the Carnot pumps of low-power reactors. He knew it had been loaded into a big air-lorry on schedule, that it had met the convoy arranged by Mankho’s factor at the appointed rendezvous on schedule, and that the cases of grenades had been swiftly extracted from the oil drums and shifted into the convoy’s vehicles.
What Lieutenant Gomez really cared about, however, were the other grenades that had been handed over at the rendezvous. When the delivery of Mankho’s grenades was being negotiated, the seller’s Lacaille agent had suggested to Mankho’s factor that they do a little side business. This was perfectly usual: agents and factors always had their own business interests and they took advantage of the logistical arrangements of larger transactions to conduct their own. It was not graft in any real sense and the principals rarely objected, provided things were kept within certain well-understood limits.
In this case, the seller’s Lacaille agent mentioned he had a few extra cases of grenades, a generation older than those in Mankho’s shipment, but still quite sophisticated, and he was having trouble moving them. They’d been dumped on him, he explained, as a result of another deal that went south—he didn’t deal in weapons much—grenades were a difficult cargo—Mankho’s factor had the connections to move them easily—he’d be more than happy to let them go for a very reasonable price—in fact, they made him kinda nervous . . .
The sales patter was just part of the culture and the deal that was struck—the grenades for a consignment of Tajima-ushi black cattle embryos that the factor knew were unlikely to be viable due to spoilage—was immaterial. All that mattered was getting those grenades on the convoy, because the seller’s Lacaille agent was also a League agent and in each of those cases that were dutifully handed over for the cryocanister of embryos was a special grenade: a class-C EMP device. Getting them into Mankho’s compound was the whole reason for the elaborate set-up.
Mankho’s compound was not a particularly impressive edifice, only about sixty meters long and forty wide, with a three-story residence in the northeast corner. But it did have a six-meter curtain wall and barracks space for about fifty men, plus three light-armored vehicles and half a dozen plain trucks. It also had a security enclosure, a perimeter sensor suite and of course secure comms. All of these—especially the security enclosure—had to be disabled if they were to have any chance of taking Mankho alive. Security enclosures were proof against EMP, most explosives, and they acted as a high-efficiency phase-conjugate mirror against lasers and most plasma weapons. They weren’t much good against solid projectiles, unless they were military grade—which this one wasn’t—and they didn’t block most varieties of snooping, although they did keep dragonflies and other remote sensors at a respectful distance.
They were also damned unpleasant to encounter—sometimes even fatal—unless you were wearing full battle harness. Since Mankho would not be, it was critical to take the enclosure out, and they also had to ensure he couldn’t call in help from Kapustin Yar. (Even though the government of Lacaille had always vehemently denied Mankho’s presence, there was no reason to believe they would disavow him to the point of tolerating an attack on their own soil.)
Detonating the EMP devices would do all that, but only if they were inside the compound or if the security enclosure was open, and that depended on how good Mankho’s security people were. If they were lax, they’d accept the preliminary checks done at the rendezvous and wave both sets of crates into the compound. But if they were doing their jobs, they’d scan the crates.
Indeed, the plan bet on them scanning the cases, but doing it with the enclosure open. There were good reasons for this. For one thing, opening, closing and reopening the enclosure took time, was wasteful and a bit of a nuisance. For another, if the grenades came too close to the sealed enclosure, they would explode. How close was too close depended on how sensitive the grenades were, so it was safest to leave the enclosure open until they got them stowed securely inside. Unless Mankho’s people had reason to be suspicious—or were extremely paranoid—it was unlikely they’d stop the convoy far enough away to run their checks with the enclosure sealed. If they were that suspicious, the crates should not have been accepted in the first place.
As for being extremely paranoid, Gomez would just have to see. He did have the option of blowing the whole load and attacking in the confusion—Buster had envisioned that—with a decent chance they could breach the perimeter so he could take out the compound’s electronics with his own EMP strike. That was not ideal, however: a decent chance was not to be compared with detonating the EMP devices with the enclosure open.
So it was up to Gomez to pick the moment to detonate the EMP devices that would take the enclosure down and render the compound deaf, blind and dumb. If anything happened to him, Bravo’s section leader would set them off. Combined with the explosion and the attack Bravo would make, that would give Angel section the minutes needed to snatch Mankho, and then Delta section’s air-sliders would whisk them all to the extraction point.
That was the plan but as always, time was of the essence. To get to Mankho before his people could react, his section had to be positioned no more than a hundred meters from the wall and they couldn’t stay that close for long without being detected—the safe estimate was less than eight mi
nutes. Alpha Team’s light combat armor incorporated the best active camouflage Nedaema could produce, which made it very good indeed, and it covered all bands from DC to daylight (if the definition of daylight was extended to include soft X-rays).
It would take equipment significantly more sophisticated than anyone would expect to find on a former colony like Lacaille to defeat the camouflage, even at the outside of the intel estimates. Lacaille, while nominally independent, was still a Bannerman dependency and the Bannermans had no sensors good enough to detect him or his people under current conditions.
But with Mankho being ‘suspected’ of working for the Dominion of Halith—and no one took the Archon’s weasel words seriously, not even the Archon—it was possible he’d managed to cadge better technology out of them. That would change the situation considerably, so the plan assumed the worst-case assessment that they faced a Halith sensor suite.
The drawback to this assessment was that it made their operational timelines very tight and denied him much flexibility—flexibility he could really use right now. Critically, his people had to start moving when the convoy was thirty klicks out, which would give them up to thirteen minutes to get into position. That was plenty, but then the convoy had to arrive at the compound and Mankho’s people had to open the security enclosure and start their checks within the next seven minutes, and Gomez was becoming seriously concerned that would prove to be unrealistic.
But if he couldn’t expect his team to remain undetected that close to the walls in the growing light for much longer than that—if indeed Mankho had Halith sensors—he also could not wait to start them and still hit the opening. Worse, he realized that his callout that they were Buster—only five minutes from now—had been premature.
Buster was based on either the enclosure not being kept open or the EMP grenades not making it onto the convoy at all. Now he was looking at neither case and if he executed Buster, he ran the risk of the convoy arriving in the middle of his operation, between the compound and his team’s extraction point, armed with a lot of sophisticated grenades.
That their whole plan was far too dependent on a single worst-case assumption was a nice, useless insight, coming this late, but his only other option was to call Zulu, and scrub the entire thing. That meant not just the failure of a very elaborate operation, six months in the making, but it would also compromise the valuable assets that had identified Mankho on Lacaille in the first place, and most especially the agent in Kapustin Yar who had arranged the whole thing.
Four minutes—still no word from Bravo. Dammit. The only way forward was to break out of the timeline and hope they either didn’t have state-of-the-art sensors or weren’t paying attention. He checked his dragonflies for any sign of new activity in the compound. The little airborne sensors—some almost the size of the Terran insect they were named for but most much smaller—orbiting about the compound reported no unexpected movement, no comms activity, no sudden power draws.
He slid out from under the overhang of rock, crawled through the waist-high native vegetation with its tough, flexible, ribbed stalks and long, fine, tubular leaves that grew thickly around the base of the outcropping to an opening where he could sweep the compound with his scope. That itself risked his being detected if a scan picked up a boresight flash off the scope, but the geometry would have to so precise it wasn’t much of a risk, especially compared to what he was contemplating.
The sweep showed him nothing new either: just the sentries he’d seen before, making their rounds when they weren’t stopping to smoke, chat, wander into the buildings to grab a bite or take a piss. Sloppy—certainly no sense of urgency there. He rolled back behind the cover of the rock. Maybe a bit too sloppy? His sight-line wasn’t the best: there was a good third of the compound he couldn’t see. Sergeant Howarth was at least fifty meters higher up—not much at this range, but maybe enough. He clicked on his icon to activate a secure circuit. “Aries, this is Six. You all up?”
“I’m up, Six.” Howarth’s voice with its distinctive accent was thin and distorted, but still recognizable over the ultra-wideband burst link.
“Are you seeing anything new at all downtown?”
“Besides those two fat guys down there lookin’ through a third-floor window, nothin’.”
Spying on the Boss in the middle of the night? The hi-def orbital scans indicated Mankho’s living quarters were on the third floor of the residence. There were windows all around with two-centimeter armor-glass in them. The first two floors extended out into the compound and there were ladders up from the second-floor roof to the top of the third-floor where two sentries were posted. From a ladder you might get a peek inside, but surely Mankho wouldn’t tolerate that? “They’re not on the roof?”
“Nope. Keep going from second floor up the west ladder. They sure seem to find it fascinatin’.”
Gomez resisted the urge to shake his head. Who knew? Maybe he liked being watched. “Aries, I’m going to ping Bravo. Get hot. We’re either Buster or Zulu if no-joy on the package.”
“Roger, Six. Buster or Zulu if package is no-joy.”
“Roger. Six out.” Gomez cut the link but before he could configure a dragonfly for OTH relay, his command circuit alerted: Bravo’s call-sign. He clicked it. “What the hell, Bravo?”
“This is Fife, Six. We got ‘em in sight.”
“You read the package?”
“Five by five. Package is still wrapped.”
Deep in his gut, a huge knot of tension unwound. “Affirm package okay. What range?”
“Got ‘em at fifty-two klicks. Making one-forty.”
“Roger, Bravo. Get hot—I’m calling in. Wait for clearance.”
“Roger, Six. Waiting for clearance. Bravo out.”
Gomez acknowledged, checked the corvette’s ephemeris, got code-lock and activated his uplink. “Hermes, this is Alpha Six.”
“Go ahead, Alpha Six.”
“Package in sight. Request clearance.”
“Wait one . . .”
Wait one? What the hell for? “Hermes, we’re at minus forty-two. Half-light in twenty-nine.”
“Acknowledge, Alpha Six. We’ve got unexplained activity down in Kap-Yar.”
Unexplained activity? Kapustin Yar was four-hundred-eighty klicks south—close enough to be a big problem if someone was on the way. “Hermes, clarify what you mean by activity.”
“We picked up some energy spikes. Trying to get a read now.”
Energy spikes? That was all? “Hermes, do we have clear air?”
“We read nothing in the air, Alpha Six.”
Goddammit! Were they clear or not? He needed to move now—one way or another. “Hermes, I mean to execute now. Do you order Zulu?”
A pause on the line. Gomez waited, fuming, tapping his gloved fingers on the rifle’s stock.
“Negative on Zulu, Alpha Six. You are cleared hot.”
“Roger, Hermes—we are cleared hot. Executing now. Alpha Six out.”
The corvette acknowledged and he killed the uplink and pinged Bravo. “Bravo, this is Six. What is range to package?”
“Package at thirty-four—closing at nominal.”
“Affirm package at thirty-four, Bravo. Nominal closure.” Lieutenant Gomez opened the burst link to his team. “All Alpha units, this is Alpha Six. Package is in range. Execute prime. Repeat: execute prime. Angels, move in one. We’re going downtown.”
Part I: New Beginnings
Court: Brother John Bates, is not that the morning which breaks yonder?
Bates: I think it be: but we have no great cause to desire the approach of day.
Williams: We see yonder the beginning of the day, but I think we shall never see the end of it . . .
Shakespeare, Henry V: Act 4, Scene 1
Chapter One
Aeolis Station
in Mars orbit, Sol
Through this Portal shall pass the Future Guardians of Mankind’s Freedom . . .
Loralynn Kennakris stood looking at
that sign engraved over the departure portal of Aeolis Station, wondering about the meaning of that message to a colonial like herself, and listening to a welcoming committee of one: a sergeant major of the Nereidian League’s Colonial Expeditionary Forces Marine Corps. He was of slightly less than average height, about twice average girth, and had a face to be carved in basalt and set outside a temple to scare off demons. The hash marks on his sleeve ran from wrist to elbow and the Anson’s Deep Star glittered on the breast of his immaculate uniform. His name was Fyodor Mikhailovich Tal Yu, and he was holding aloft a bronze box.
“This is where it ends, boys and girls. For those who want to know, it’s about twenty-two centimeters long, fifteen wide and maybe ten high. Mass about six kilos. And if you think that being an officer in the CEF is just a ticket to a nice pension—to voting rights, medical privileges and settlement prerogatives—take a good, hard look. This here is the culmination of your career. Fail in your duty and you go home in one of these. Let down your mates and you go home in one of these. Disobey your orders and you go home in one of these. Don’t listen to me and you go home in one of these.” He paused to let that last comment sink in. Then: “Win a glorious victory . . . and you can go home in one of these, too.”
His small, black, old, searching eyes swept the little group. There were fifty-six of them standing there waiting to enter the CEF Academy as Class 1861. They came from all over the League and they’d all graduated in the top ten percent of their university class, after which they survived a battery of tests: mental, physical, and political too, for no one was admitted without a state sponsor, usually a senator for Homeworlders, or for colonials, the territorial governor. But there were exceptions—she was one.
The members of Class 1861 were exceptional in another way. The Academy organized its incoming classes by service branch: Navy, Marines, and the Strike and Reconnaissance Forces, or as they were commonly known, the Fighters. Only the top five percent of those accepted could apply for the SRF flight-officer program, the most grueling track at the Academy and the one which, in the Academy’s wholly unofficial pecking order, constituted the institution’s elite. Class 1861 represented twenty percent of that incoming elite.
The Loralynn Kennakris series Boxed Set Page 19