Ephialtes (Ephialtes Trilogy Book 1)

by Parker, Gavin E

  “Wine?” Madeline offered.

  “I’d better not. I have a committee later.” White reached for the carafe of water in the centre of the table and poured himself a glass.

  “Great news about the war,” said Madeline.

  White nodded. “Not so great from a business point of view,” he said.

  Madeline frowned at the remark. “Come on, that’s low. We’re not in the war game, we’re in the armaments game. Different thing.”

  “Is it?” asked White. He was hoping to pull the subject back to something lighter as soon as possible. He only had one hour with Madeline and he didn’t want to spend it arguing about the morality of her portfolio.

  Madeline was the majority owner of Helios Matériel Corporation, the number one USAN defence contractor. She had long held that in her line war was bad for business. If it came to an actual shooting war then her products had not served their true purpose; deterrence, or ‘Peace Through Superior Firepower,’ as the t-shirt had it. Madeline preferred Teddy Roosevelt’s ‘Speak softly, and carry a big stick.’ All Helios did was provide big sticks. The best big sticks in the business, she thought.

  “What are you going to do with those carriers now?” asked White as the waiter served the entrée.

  Madeline thanked the waiter. “Deliver them to the client as planned,” she said. “Like we were always going to. And the client is . . .” She pretended to search for the name, like she was solving a difficult riddle. “. . . the USAN Government, I think. Heard of them?”

  White chuckled. “I surely have,” he said. “We’ll be paying for those damned things until my grandkids have retired,” he said, gently shaking his head.

  The two carriers, known together as the Aloadae, were to have been the crowning glory of the USAN Army Commander Program. The two ships - the biggest spacecraft ever built - had been designed to provide an extremely rapid response to any perceived threat, in any theatre at any time, on the surface of the Earth.

  The carrier ships carried twelve dropships each and were to be stationed in permanent low Earth orbit, able to move around the globe as and when necessary. Each dropship could deliver a Commander Program squad to the surface of the Earth within twenty minutes of the order being given. Each dropship was fully automated but nominally piloted by the human commander of the squad. Eleven humanoid-shaped mech drones hung in the bays behind the pilot. Once the squad had been dispatched the dropship would then act as an aerial drone. The dropships had limited but useful firepower and were a huge asset in terms of reconnaissance.

  The first carrier, Ephialtes, had been delivered three months ago. The peace talks were well under way at that time so, despite some skirmishes along the most bitterly contested borders, there had been no deployments made from it. Delivery of the second carrier, Otus, was scheduled for two months’ time. The great warship was to be borne into the heavens two months after the war it was designed to fight had ended. White was sanguine about that. Maybe Madeline was right after all. Maybe the carriers had added to the deterrence element of the USAN’s military might. Maybe that had played a role in the negotiations and therefore, maybe, just maybe, the carriers did help to bring about the end of the war, just as they had been designed to. Still, he’d rather not be paying for the damned things. Winning the war was one thing. White’s focus now was on winning the peace and for that he, or rather the USAN government he represented, would need every spare cent there was.

  The meal was agreeable and they ate together. As White had hoped, the conversation turned more convivial. They chatted about their kids and their day to day lives. Madeline’s daughter Melissa had just got engaged to a realtor, and Madeline wasn’t convinced it was a great match. For a short period White was far away from the jungle of government.

  Presently, he looked at his watch and patted the sides of his mouth with a napkin. “Look, this has been great, Madeline,” he said.

  “You’re not staying for dessert?” Madeline replied.

  “I’d love to, but,” he shrugged, “I’ve got to run.”

  White stood up and leaned across the table to kiss Madeline on the cheek. “I love ya, babe,” he said into her ear and, winking, he straightened his tie and left.

  Audrey Andrews sat in the biggest chair in the room. It was premium ethically grown leather, very comfortable, and higher than the other chairs. In front of her were to two long, short coffee tables end to end, with two rows of slightly less comfortable chairs surrounding them. On the tables were bottled water and bowls of fruit, which no one was eating. In the chairs were the brightest and the best of the defence department, or at least the most senior, and Andrews was their leader.

  Andrews leaned forward. “What have we got?”

  “Domestic terrorism is at a nine year low,” said a man to Andrews’ left. “There have been no major incidents in the mainland this year and only one last year in the entire USAN, where the perpetrators were quickly apprehended and their cell closed down. The powers granted us under the Restrictive War Measures have proved invaluable in intercepting terrorist communications. There’ll always be a few loopy-loos with a cause picked up from the internet, and there’s not much we can do about them, but the traditional domestic terror groups have all but been eradicated.”

  “Overseas?” said Andrews

  A woman to Andrews’ right, seated a little way down from her, responded. “The Asian Bloc poses no immediate threat. We are continuing to monitor communications and it seems they’re as relieved as we are that the war has come to an end. There are some dissenters near the top of the regime - we’ve always known about them, of course - but even they recognise that the terms of the armistice were a necessary compromise. They would have been unable to sustain their casualty rates into the future and they knew that we had the upper hand in all areas - military, economic and logistic. Great wars always come down to battles of attrition, I guess, and in the end we managed to grind them down. The war has done lasting damage to their economies and infrastructure. They currently pose the weakest of threats, but their capacity to act against us in the short and medium term has been neutralized.

  “Of the unaligned countries, none have the necessary economic or military power to pose a significant threat, nor the inclination, either. The greater USAN is probably now in the most secure position it has been in for the last hundred years.”

  Audrey smiled. “That’s good,” she said, “thank you.” She glanced down at her papers. “We find ourselves in the happy position of not having a war to fight. Of course, that doesn’t mean there’s nothing for us to do. I expect that in the next few months we’ll be hearing about cuts to our budgets, so I’d like you to start thinking about that now. I’d also like to ask you to consider how we should be rethinking our force deployment to best support the new peace and guard against any flare-ups in the more contested regions.

  “Before the end of the summer I’d like a series of reports prepared. Budget reviews, analyses of our most problematic borders, and a deep overview of the geopolitical landscape we will be dealing with for the next five to ten years. A major war like the one we’ve just been through comes along maybe once every few generations, and thank God it’s over, but peace tends to be fleeting, so very soon it’s going to be back to pre-war business as usual for us. Our nation spans the globe and you can bet that someone, somewhere, is grinding an axe even as we speak. Tin-pot generals and wannabe revolutionaries bringing a little local misery into the world are likely to be the crux of our business for the foreseeable future.”

  At the far end of the tables a woman timidly raised her hand. “Ms Andrews?” she said. Heads turned to look at the woman, who half lowered her hand and shrank back a little. Andrews leant forward, better to look at the woman.

  “Yes?” said Andrews.

  The woman steadied herself. “You know there has been some seditious talk coming from Mars?”

  Audrey looked at the woman. “There has? Well, get that into the report on geopolitics if you
must, but I’d rather we focused on plausible areas of contention.”

  “One of our monitoring stations on Mare Orientale has recently picked up some conversations, believed to be from inside Venkdt Corp, with a decidedly unpatriotic bent.”

  Audrey looked at the woman. “Believed to be?” she said. “Honey, two PAs talking shit in their lunch break does not make for a revolution.”

  The woman hesitated. “We think the conversation was between a high ranking officer at Venkdt Mars and an equally high ranking Venkdt official here in the USAN.”

  “I think the hazard level will be minimal. Mars is no threat to national security – it’s a hundred and forty million miles away, for one thing. And they don’t have a military.”

  “They have deuterium,” the woman said. “They could harm us as much by omission as commission.”

  Audrey’s temperature was rising. “Maybe we’ll leave this one to the foreign office. We’re looking for military threats, and this isn’t one. But thank you for your contribution.”

  Audrey spoke to the room. “In summary, the war’s over. Get ready for change. We’re currently geared up for a large scale global conflict that has now ended. We have to prepare ourselves for smaller, maybe more widely distributed hostilities in the future, and as part of that we need to be thinking about where those might arise.

  “Go back to your desks, find the next potential crises and think about how we can stop them before they get started.” She stood and left.

  The old barracks was a no frills operation. There were no home comforts to speak of and it comprised of what were more or less sheds. The doors were draughty, and on a cold winter’s night the windows would rattle in their frames. The living quarters were sheds with rows of double bunks down either side, with a red painted concrete floor shined to a mirror finish by generations of marines. The Commander Program, with its emphasis on the physical, embraced all that was old-school and hard and outdoors. For the commanders the air conditioned stations of the regular soldiers, with their IVR get-ups and their well-appointed living spaces, reeked of decadence. A real soldier - a Warrior - had to be in touch with the earth. He or she had to know the pain of hunger in their belly; know the chill of the cold against their inner core; know the weakness and the tiredness of days in the unforgiving wilderness, and by that know themselves. The commanders, willing to stride onto the field of battle and kill or be killed, could live and sleep in an unheated, wind-rattled shed and know it was luxury, never once thinking of complaining.

  A group of commanders was coming home. From air conditioned hotels or the centrally heated houses of their families they returned from leave, coming back to their true home.

  When Sebastian Foley reached hut thirteen Steiner and Johnson were already there. Steiner and Johnson shared a set of bunks, with Steiner in the lower bunk. ‘I like to be on top,’ Johnson liked to say. Foley greeted them with his customary long, ‘Heeeey!’ and they bumped fists and slapped backs like the jocks they were. Steiner had swung his feet around, sat up and got out of his bunk the moment he saw Foley approach. Johnson, who was sat on the top bunk, took a more laconic approach. He remained seated, a huge grin on his broad face, as he reached down to grab Foley by the shoulder. “What’s up, man?” he said.

  “What’s up?” Foley replied, grinning back and nodding at Johnson as he took Steiner’s offered hand and shook it firmly, pat-slapping him on the shoulder as he let go. “Steiner, my man!” he said, “Look at you. You look different, all cleaned up and filled out.”

  “Four weeks of home cooking will do that for you,” said Steiner. “How’ve you been?”

  “I’ve been good,” Foley replied, “I’m rested, recuperated and ready to go.”

  “That’s good,” Steiner smiled, “that’s good.”

  “How’re you doin’, big fella?” Foley said to Johnson. “How was your leave?”

  Johnson slid from the bunk to the floor. “It was good. Caught up with Stone, done some fishin’.”

  Foley pushed his kit bag into his locker and hopped up on his bunk. “So we won the war,” he said, “and now we’re sad, for there are no more enemy to kill.” He lay on his back. “What do you think this is about?” he asked himself as much as anyone else.

  “It’s Dubai. It’s not happening, I reckon,” offered Johnson.

  “Investigation,” said Steiner. “I’ve seen footage on the bulletins of Mombasa - great stuff, I might add - and I’ll bet some whiny bedroom activist has spotted something in there or in the off-line feeds and raised shit about it.”

  “I don’t care if they do,” said Foley. “My conscience is clear. I didn’t see anything that wasn’t Marquis of Queensberry or Geneva Convention or whatever the hell it is. We did a good job and we did it right. If anyone’s complaining about anything they should be complaining about what happened to Hughes.”

  “That’s right,” said Johnson.

  Steiner stared at the floor.

  “That’s just savage,” continued Johnson, “and they should be called to account for that. That was some bad juju.” Johnson clapped one of his enormous hands on Steiner’s back.

  When Commander Sam Hughes’ command drone had been taken out at Mombasa Steiner had taken his squad over to defend the wrecked drone while assistance could be organised and dispatched. He had ascertained that Hughes had survived the GRPG attack that had felled his drone but was trapped inside, badly injured. What he hadn’t ascertained was that, in the few short minutes it had taken him to reach the area, Hughes’ drone had been booby-trapped. When Steiner had used his huge mechanical arm to lift some of the wreckage from Hughes’ fallen drone the blast had knocked his own drone clear over. Hughes was killed and Steiner suffered multiple injuries. He was out cold for several minutes. His head was superficially but bloodily cut. When he was picked up the med crew at first assumed him to be dead. His vital sign monitors had all failed in the blast and he was unconscious and covered in blood. The last thing he remembered was seeing Hughes turning to look at him, struggling to mask his pain with a weak smile and his thumb raised in the time honoured gesture of thanks. That image had stayed with him.

  There was a whisper from over near one of the windows, “Captain’s coming,” and commanders scattered about and leapt from their bunks.

  “Captain’s coming,” Johnson echoed as he, Steiner and Foley came to the front of their bunks, standing bolt upright with their arms straight at their sides, looking forward.

  Captain Brian Connor entered the hut at a fair clip and strode immediately to the front centre, equidistant from the two rows of bunks which ran away from him up the sides of the hut. Without stopping to pause or even acknowledge any of the commanders he began to talk.

  “At ease people, and gather ’round me here.” The commanders moved at a quick saunter to form a semi-circle around Connor at the head of the hut.

  Captain Connor was, at twenty-eight years, at least five years older than the oldest commander under his command. He was a born soldier and had jumped at the opportunity to become involved in the USAN Army Commander Program. He had finessed the original plans for the program and tested them on the training grounds. Having been in at the very beginning he had overseen the training of the instructors and after three long years had finally, at the second request, been given command of company slated for deployment in the Asian theatre, fourteen months before the end of the war.

  As captain of the company Connor, while at least not some REMF controlling drones from a shed in Kentucky, was still not quite in the thick of it like his men. His role of comcon was best fulfilled from a semi-automated aerial drone, directing missions from above. Lucky for him, then, that he had been injured in a training exercise, for the scar it left him with on the right side of his face seemed to show to the world that he was a Physical Soldier.

  He had been bawling out a rookie commander who was having trouble adjusting from IVR training simulations to being in an actual command drone. Connor was stood on the tarmac i
n front of him, dwarfed by the four metre tower of metal and ammo in front of him, shouting up at the pilot like he was training a poodle. It said something to the quality of the man that a trained soldier, encased in the frame of a metal giant with enough firepower to level a small town, was intimidated by a five foot five inch captain wearing nothing more than the olive-drab uniform of the USANMC and a cap. The jittery would-be commander, anxious to do the right thing under the tirade from Connor, proceeded to miscontrol his mech and a sixteen tonne metal arm wooshed around, smacking Connor in the face.

  Connor was intensely proud of the scar, though he affected to not give it a moment’s thought. He had received it doing his duty, and that was good enough for him. His service injury had marked him for life and was there on his face for all to see. He would have been ashamed to report to the MO with RSI like some of these rear echelon drone operators, for whom a paper cut would lead to at least a day off sick, or maybe even litigation. No so for Captain Conner. He had taken one to the face in the line of duty and got up and carried on.

  Conner stood with his hands behind his back and his feet about sixty centimetres apart. His head was held high and he appeared to be addressing someone floating a metre or two above the people circled about him. His speech was deliberate, measured and loud.

  “You people acquitted yourselves well in the war that has just passed. The corps is proud of you. I am proud of you. That war is now ended. What does the warrior do when there is no war?” He waited. “The warrior prepares for war. You will remain here on a training and preparedness detail, and you will remain sharp, and you will remain frosty.”

  The group shuffled just a little and a commander near the front offered a very pensive, “Sir?”

  Connor snapped his head in the commander’s direction. “What is it, Commander?”

  “Does this mean we’re not going to Dubai?”