by Stephen Moss
They had been forced to withhold their fire, Ayala assumed, because of the speed with which their attackers had merged into the very ranks of their own infantry, but now whoever was in command had clearly seen the pointlessness of that, and whether through callousness or a simple realization that the infantry in question were dead anyway, they now ordered their big guns to open fire.
She saw the shots only as blurred lines tracing out from inside the sheds and into the mass of crushed bone and flesh that surrounded her three teammates. But the impacts were massive, and the destruction as impressive as it was horrifying.
Niels suffered a glancing hit and was thrown high into the air, the explosion finishing for him the job of killing the platoon he had engaged with, even as it sent him flying. Cara sensed the change in fight from the Koreans a moment before they fired and flattened herself against the ground, taking a hard hit to her right arm and leg, but avoiding the full force of the blow.
Then there was Hektor. Ayala could see not exactly what had happened to Hektor. She was already running, her legs firing now with passion. They had apparently not even seen her yet, amid the franticness of the attack. Though her fire had been tireless and deadly, her kills had been incorrectly attributed to the team of three that had so bluntly charged the Korean’s ranks.
Now she made her presence more known as she saw the first of the big black tanks rolling out of the shed. She fired with a persistence that bordered on mania, centering on one spot on the tank’s side to eat into its thick flanks. The tank felt the barrage as a rumbling vibration that quickly rose to fever pitch. Ayala’s presence was a secret no more and the stocky black beast turned now, rounding on this new combatant to return the greeting.
Ayala saw it and kept moving, aware she was drawing fire but still keen to bring down the infernal machine. She had, she knew, gone off half cocked, but even the mighty barrage the four tanks had fired had not smited her team. This battle was far from lost.
Niels emerged from the smoke that had been his last known position like a returning demon, adding his own fire to Ayala’s when he saw which tank she was targeting.
But they were tough little fuckers, thought Ayala, as she sprinted away from an incoming blast from the big beast.
She lost her footing as the shell impacted the concrete ground and was sent tumbling and sprawling across the floor. Niels was not faring much better as he dodged another shell to his position, though he did so with more grace than Ayala had managed.
Not good, Ayala thought to herself as she got to her feet and started moving again. Must keep moving, she thought, and brought her gun back to bear on the black hulk.
Cara was thinking the same thing, though her response was a touch more aggressive as she leapt violently into the air to land between two of the burly brawlers. No sooner had her feet touched the ground than she was darting up and onto one of them, firing as she went.
Niels smiled at the tactic, as did Ayala, watching with detached interest the view from Cara’s eyes as she began firing into the seam between the gun turret and the tank proper. Her amusement was cut short, though, when a panel on the tank’s side exploded outward, throwing Cara violently clear.
Ayala was at the end of her tether. They were damaging the big tank, but not quickly enough. They still had two more here, and who knew if there were more inbound on their position. She needed a new tactic.
And then the question was answered for her. A new tactic, as it were, was arriving even now. A voice rang in all their heads, even though it was meant mostly for Cara.
Minnie:
Banu came in hard but did not unleash her full might. She did not want to hurt the four friends she knew were down there. Her beams were tight, lensing from her four ancillary engines into the four tanks, but still they struck like a blow from an enraged zeus.
The stout machines even withstood her particle onslaught for a couple of seconds, such was the strength of their armor, but this was not a contest they could win anymore, and Ayala and her cohorts watched with satisfaction as the four tanks buckled and then started to fold. Banu continued pummeling them for as long as she needed to, grinding the four beasts into the glowing concrete around their tracks, before spinning on her heels.
Banu did not come too close. Her statement was made.
Ayala: ‘thank you, banu, minnie. very nicely done. minnie, have banu take the skalm back into orbit, please. but stay close. we may need her again before we are done.’
From out of the smoldering wreckage stepped Cara, not very pleased to have been so close to the particle beams, perhaps, but happy of the conclusion, nonetheless.
Ayala: ‘hektor. ¿hektor, where are you?’
There was a moment’s silence then the reply came.
Hektor: ‘i am pretty sure i am here [loc. 1293.6, 4583.2] but …’
Niels: ‘i have him. he’s … whoa, lieutenant, you are a little beaten up, my friend.’
Far away to the north, the Slink was rising from its watery hiding place without ceremony and accelerating hard into the night. Other teams were inbound as well, though they were still a couple of hours out.
As the dust settled and Ayala’s team began to round up the stragglers, Neal took a breath for the first time in nearly a minute.
Neal: ‘ayala, remind me never to let you go on a covert mission again.’
Ayala: ‘certainly, neal. remind me not to ask your permission in the future.’
He did not laugh at the retort. He feared it was too close to the truth of their new paradigm. She did not care, not about herself, and not about the rules. She saw only the goal, but now, in the aftermath, she focused on the patchy med information now starting to come through from Hektor’s damaged battleskin.
Ayala: ‘niels, i am en route to hektor’s position. we’ll have him out of here shortly. for now, though, i need you and cara sweeping the sheds. we need to see if jung and chin are in there. stay tight and stay in touch. that said, i hope you will not encounter too much more resistance now. i am hoping they have gotten the message.’
They had. The once impressive tools that a hopeful Great Leader had thought would be the key to reclaiming his lost lands to the south so he could rebuild his diseased and broken nation, and which the Chinese had hoped would distract or destabilize TASC while they rebuilt the power structures Neal had so thoroughly violated, had just been obliterated.
What was left of that force was even now fleeing into the countryside, choosing to take their chances amongst the plague that had wiped out their countrymen rather than stand against the gods they had clearly just stirred into a murderous rage.
Neither the Chinese nor the North Koreans would, in later days, acknowledge that it was only five units, including Banu, who had brought them to heel, not even to themselves.
Jung and Chin would be handed over in time, shaken to the very core. Jung would be in the worst shape. They had quickly determined he was the more senior and his torture had taken a more brutal and permanently scarring turn. But where his body had been broken his spirit was not, not completely. Chin would return home, happy that he had played a part in stopping what had turned out to be a very real and potent threat to his homeland. Jung would need more pervasive treatment than his home country could offer him. He would not see South Korea again for a long time.
In the coming weeks, Neal would ignore objections from a cowed but still defiant Chinese government and establish a permanent presence in Pyongyang, helping UN forces to try to bring some desperately needed assistance and sanity to the plagued nation.
Their so-called Great Leader would object at first, but would acquiesce once Ayala made it clear that the only alternative was her full fury, in the form of her unleashing the same might she had wrought on his forces on his party leadership, and his good self too, if necessary.
She would prove most persuasive. Ironically, the veil around his nation that had once protected him from the world’s judgm
ent would allow her to let her cold purpose show. Unmasked, her wrath was fearsome. Fearsome enough that even the criminally insane could see that it would be suicide to resist her. And so the chubby little megalomaniac whose forebears had set his nation back decades with the profoundness of their selfishness and cruelty would begrudgingly accept a new role, one of puppet.
And, in the form of the diseased nation of North Korea, Neal and his allies would unwittingly gain a fifth district to preside over, Neal’s little empire growing now to encompass the country’s tired, poor, and huddled masses.
Second Part:
Interval A: Her World
Princess Lamati, Second in Line to the Ascension and Named Arbiter of New Mobilius, lay prone on a couch. A pleasant gravity held her gently in the soft confines of her bed, which undulated beneath her.
A man entered the space. Or to be more precise, a man who had requested entry, been vetted by level upon level of automated security despite his clear right to be in her presence, and had then been granted permission to speak with her directly, appeared at her side.
“Brim, how are you?” she said, raising a leg lazily into the air. It was not a sensual gesture, though she acted as though it was. It was an insult, or rather a statement of power. It said simply ‘you are no threat to me so I need not keep my feet on the ground.’ But she smiled anyway, as though she was being every bit the demure and polite princess she evinced herself to be.
“I am well. Thank you, my princess.” He leaned backwards and down, his rear-kneed legs folding under him as his eyes moved to the sky and he revealed his soft underbelly to her.
She sat up. No matter how often her subjects did this simple act of servility, she never tired of it. Back on Mobilius she had, more than once, killed a man in this very position, even as he showed his complete trust in her by falling into it. But cracking this man in his soft, exposed belly cavity with one of her powerful legs would be a pointless gesture, and would no more kill him than if she bludgeoned him atop his head with one of the ceremonial clubs lining the room’s walls.
For the clubs were fake, as was the man in front of her, and as was she. Which made the act of bowing just as pointless, she supposed, done as it was in the ether.
She had the power and authority to kill him for real, of course. To send order for his sleeping body to be seared and recycled for nutrients in whatever habitat craft he was travelling in. But that, like so many of her hobbies back home, would be frowned on in the confines of the Armada. Given the length and importance of their mission, every life here had a purpose, every death would need to be accounted for.
She sighed. “Rise, Brim. Stop prostrating yourself!” she said, expressing her frustration and boredom in less martial ways.
He rose, his eyes betraying his genuine fear as they must, such were the rules of the system. When around one’s betters, one could not disguise one’s emotions, the system bled them through without mercy. Were Princess Lamati to have a senior in the fleet, the same rule would apply to her. But she did not. Counterparts, perhaps, or at least they liked to think so, but no seniors. And once they had taken the Earth for their own, she would then see to it that even they saluted her.
But that was to come. A step to be taken after many still ahead.
“What do we have planned this cycle, Brim?” she said with an air of boredom, leaping gracefully over to the broad window in one wall of her virtual suite, a window that opened onto an elaborate balcony.
She stepped onto the broad stone gallery and looked out at the view. It was of her own homeland, the BaltanSant, the massive city that straddled the link between the Contran continent and the Great Peninsula. It was the seat of Lamat power, originally giving them control over the trade between the nomads of the Great Peninsula and the fledgling rival nation states of the Contran. Over a thousand years it had evolved, though, into the ever more fortified border of a subdued Peninsula, now ruled over rather than traded with.
The walls had risen high over the centuries, tipped by the two fortresses that guarded the coastal approaches and the great Castelion that topped Heaven’s Ridge in the middle. Together, the three had buttressed the mighty Lamati Empire against countless invasion attempts over a millennium.
Her view now was from the great parapet of the Castelion. To her south lay the city of BaltanSant, sprawling and rich, limited in height by ancient law to never exceed the height of Castelion’s lowest parapets, it had spread south into the land it dominated.
To the north lay the Boneyard. The religiously undeveloped flats of the approach. The plain was now pierced by the great roads and train lines that linked modern BaltanSant with its relatively more recent acquisitions to the north. But even those dipped underground as they approached the Wall, to join the vacuum tubes that already ran there, into the city and then outward to the Great Peninsula beyond. Only four ancient and now mostly ceremonial roads approached the Wall itself, to the Blue Gates, so named for the blood-blue they had long ago been painted to match the bloodied remains that had been left of any who tried to break through them.
The great castle she stood atop was her father’s domain. A place she had hoped to inherit if her sister had not remained gallingly alive. But her plots against her kin had necessarily remained covert, hopelessly so, certain as she was that sororicide would be the one crime her father would not forgive. And so she was here. Headed to conquer her own empire in her father’s name.
“Today, my princess, the only scheduled event is the Council Meeting,” said Brim, instantly regretting that he had been forced to mention it.
“I know about the damn Council Meeting!” she screamed. “Damn you, Brim! I meant what activities have you planned for me!”
She did not turn on him but remained facing out on her virtual view of the empire that should have been hers. He was thankful for that small mercy, her focus not being on him directly, for it was taking every part of him to master his growing loathing for the woman. He could not, he knew, last much longer in her service, and would have been dead long ago if it weren’t for the restrictions of the mission. But she refused to take an AI or even an AM assistant. She wanted someone she could punish if he displeased her.
And by sad circumstance, that someone was to be Brim. He wondered how much longer it would be before she found some excuse to kill him. Some loophole that would allow her to vent her frustrations on him.
“Well, my princess, I had planned a parade across the Boneyard in your honor. There was to be a glider demonstration, with sentences to meet out, should you wish it.”
He smiled with genuine hope. It had been one of her favorite pastimes back home.
Yes, she thought, that does sound appealing, but … “You will arrange for actual sentences, Brim, yes? There is no point if there are not actual sentences.”
She seemed hopeful, and he nodded. He had anticipated this albeit distasteful turn, and sent back word of her potential impending need to Mobilius, decades behind them.
“But first, my princess,” said Brim hesitantly, “the …”
“Yes, yes, Brim. The Council Meeting,” she said petulantly. “How long do I have before it starts?”
“They are ready now, my princess. You said to only disturb you when the others were gathered.”
He winced visibly. It was one of her many endearing qualities: she wished not to be disturbed until the last possible minute, and indeed was livid if anyone arrived at a function after her, but she also got very annoyed if she was ‘too’ late.
Such a wonderful leader, Brim repeated to himself over and over, as she glared at him and he sent signal for their avatars to be transposed.
- - -
The Council met in a space where they could not, in reality, exist. They sat outside and above the Armada. The meeting’s virtual location was the choice of the Chair, a rotating and mostly ceremonial title. For the year of their holding of the gavel, each Chair could choose the setting for the Council Meetings, as well as the order of each sessio
n’s agenda, if not its actual contents.
DefaLuta’s choice was, as always, both beautiful and mildly disconcerting. Her AM creating a real-time simulation for them from the tactical data being constantly supplied to each state’s Prime Mind as they shared the day-to-day running of the huge flotilla.
The group formed as though around a table, each seated on nothingness, the table itself but a shimmering transparency merely there to demark and separate the representatives and help keep the proceedings civilized. There were seven places around the table, one notably and predictably still empty. Behind each of the six representatives already present stood various other embodiments, the virtual representations of whomever each person chose to bring to the meetings with them.
For most it was an avatar of their State or Alliance’s Prime Mind, the AM they had each bred for the very job of coming on this mission to monitor and manage their nation’s military and colonial craft.
For one, the ever-punctual Princess Lamati, it would be, when she eventually got here, whichever unfortunate person had the honor of being her personal whipping boy. DefaLuta seemed to remember the current lucky soul’s name was Brim.
For DefaLuta, it was her own AM, child of her mind and the Prime Mind, a concession to a growing cultural norm in her home country Kyryl of having an AM child with the communal mind for your area, a happy union of home and self, of patriotism and individuality. At the time of your death, voluntary or otherwise, the AM could choose to return to the Prime Mind or exist independently, as an echo of its former parent.
DefaLuta’s AM, who had no name other than that of her parent, here took the form of a small primate: hairy, soft and almost unnaturally cute, wrapped around DefaLuta’s neck and shoulders.
While they waited, DefaLuta and her other self surveyed the surroundings they had chosen with satisfaction. The table, along with its six waiting representatives and their assistants, orbited as one around the entire fleet as it surged through the cosmos, its gathered engines bound together and firing as one in a mighty plume to slow them, a decelerating thrust that had lasted for almost twenty years.