Six of the audience picked up the three fallen officers and carried them to the back of the room and zipped them into body bags. They then returned to their seats.
“Thank you, gentlemen. We’re going to re-position ourselves now, so we can let you all get some food.”
Paszek sent orders on the brigade’s secure VR, and the half of his men down the side of the room left through the door they came in through. They would have four hours to rest before coming in to relieve the twenty that remained across the front of the room.
“All right. All you gentlemen in the first three rows can get up and avail yourselves of food and refreshments, or use the restrooms in the back. There’s no way out from the restrooms, so don’t try anything like that and get in trouble, OK? Let’s all go home safe at the end of this. OK. First three rows. Ten minutes.”
It would take over an hour and a half to cycle through all thirty rows, while the sound of shuttles and vehicles could be dimly heard outside.
Going Active
Fran Kersey and Lyle Boardman were at the dam site with Lucas Jourbet again on Monday morning, their Secret Police escort tagging along.
“Well, they should be unpacking all the equipment today. Wait till you see this,” Boardman said.
“I’m looking forward to it,” Jourbet said.
They were walking toward the camp from their vehicles, the two Secret Police officers tagging along behind.
The tension in the communications center kept building as the moment approached. They were watching the feed from the surveillance cameras in the warehouse.
“... and move up to bigger and bigger systems as the day proceeds.”
“Now!” the first sergeant running the comm center said.
The QE console operators were first. They brought down the colony’s QE radio links to the rest of humanity. With its own secure QE node, the brigade wasn’t cut off, but off-planet links were currently limited to command staff.
“QE’s down.”
Another operator ran a test against the system.
“Confirmed. QE is down.”
Next was the operator of the VR suppression equipment mounted in the roof rafters of the warehouse. He turned on the suppressors, cutting off all the swells in the room they were monitoring from the planetary VR system.
“VR suppression is active.”
Another operator ran a test against the system.
“Confirmed. VR suppression is active.”
The first sergeant gave a thumbs up to Major Karel Havel, monitoring the action, and he relayed their status to brigade command over VR.
Kersey was tied into her brigade headquarters over the brigade’s private VR system as they walked toward the camp. She heard the message come through from Major Havel in the communications center.
“Comm Status: Ready for Active.”
Kersey keyed the brigade command net for transmission to all personnel and sent the order.
“Go Active. Go Active. Go Active.”
The camp around them seemed to explode. Troops in MCUs and body armor and combat helmets came boiling out of the barracks tents, headed at a dead run to their stations.
Joubert and the Secret Police walking with Kersey and Boardman watched in astonishment as the quiet scene exploded into bedlam. Four Marines came out of a tent they were passing, and ran up to the Secret Police, who were caught completely flat-footed by the suddenness of events.
Boardman turned around to face the Secret Police as soon as the order was given.
“Sorry, fellas, but you gotta drop your weapons, or I’ll have to have these men kill you.”
The stunned Secret Police surrendered their weapons and Boardman turned to Joubert.
“Mr. Joubert, you need to go with these men. They’ll keep you out of danger until this is all over.”
“But what’s going on?”
“We have an appointment with Mr. Mieland.”
At that, Boardman turned and ran after Kersey, who had left at a dead run for her command headquarters tent, shedding her civilian clothing as she ran.
He could hear the roar of diesel engines off toward the equipment area.
When the order came in, every man in the encampment at the dam site ran for his station. Sergeant Jankowski and the rest of Lieutenant Halvorson’s tank crew ran for their designated container in the equipment area. It was stenciled ‘Model D-33 Earthmover.’ Jankowski hit the container doors release, and the doors swung open. He was staring at the front of an M15 Imperial Marines battle tank, it’s turret turned so the big gun faced backwards.
“That’s my kinda earthmover, baby,” Jankowski said to no one in particular as the rest of the crew swarmed up the front of the tank.
Halvorson and the crew dropped down into their hatches, Jankowski climbing into the gunner’s chair. He brought up his sighting system and the turret control system. All lights green.
Cortez made his way to the rear deck. As rear gunner, he was also responsible for the equipment sled chained to the rear of the unit. He made his way down the rear handholds as the big diesel engine roared to life in the confines of the container.
“Help me, Momma, but I love that sound.”
The M15 eased forward, dragging the sled with it, until the big gun was in the clear and the sled was in front of the container. The driver then backed up a couple feet to ease the tension on the chains to the sled.
“OK, Cortez,” Halvorson said over the crew channel in VR.
Cortez dropped down and hit the releases on the chains as the turret rotated and the big gun swung around to face forward. He swarmed back up the ladder to his own hatch, and dropped down into the rear gunner’s chair.
“Cortez aboard,” he said in VR.
He was bringing up his sighting systems as the tank eased forward and then swung to the right to join the queue headed for the highway.
Just to humor Halvorson, Cortez turned on the IFF interlocks on the rear osmium impeller.
Turley and Gordon came running into the command tent in their skivvies. Lieutenant Parsons, Turley’s aide, was standing there with their MCUs, body armor, and covers. They both dressed while watching the status reports in VR.
They had just finished lacing up the Marine-issue boots when they heard the clank of treads and a diesel engine approach outside.
“There’s our ride, Ma’am,” Gordon said.
They walked outside to find the big armored command vehicle (ACV) parked outside the door. It was an M15 chassis, with the mobile command center in place of the turret and the big gun. They climbed up the forward ladder and through the hatch into the command center, where the rest of her mobile command staff waited. They took their seats and strapped in.
“Ahhh. That’s more like it, Ma’am. That civilian shit was gettin’ on my nerves,” Gordon said.
“Yes, Sergeant Major. It’s like coming home after a long vacation.”
Turley brought up her displays, the back-ups to her VR system access.
The ACV lurched forward, then swung around to head off toward the queuing column.
At the spaceport, airborne assets had deployed as soon as the ‘Go Active’ order had come in from brigade command.
Two dozen aerial reconnaissance drones, arrayed as if for display to the training students, shot into the sky, their operators watching for any hostile forces on the move, most especially enemy air assets.
Six armored assault shuttles spooled up and leapt into the sky after them. They spread out around the encampment and the equipment stores near the terminal building, heaviest on the side toward the city. Two of them fired guided missiles that shot off toward the Government Center complex and turned control over to the communications center.
“Confirmed. We have control.”
“We have target acquisition and lock on the Security Ministry VR systems.”
The missiles sped across the city, then angled down toward two rooftop installations on widely separated buildings within the Government Cente
r complex. They impacted and exploded.
“Confirmed. Security Ministry VR system is down. Both redundant transceivers are off the air.”
One of the Security Ministry VR transceivers was on the Security Ministry, the other was on the Executive Building. President James Mieland’s office shook when the missile detonated on the roof of his building.
“What the hell was that?” he said to his empty office.
Mieland called Minister of Security Hubert Land on a channel on the main VR system.
“Bert, what the hell is going on?”
“I don’t know, sir. We just got hit by something.”
“You have no reports of what is happening?”
“No, sir. The Security Ministry VR system is out. I can’t get any reports from anybody. I can’t even tell anybody to go look and report back verbally. Everybody on duty out in the field is out of touch, and so are those off-duty at home. We don’t even know where people are.”
“What about your redundant system?”
“That’s out, too, sir.”
“Well, the main VR system is operational. Use that.”
“I can’t, sir. None of the men have permissions on that system. It will take us days to grant permissions.”
“Figure out something, dammit. We need to know what’s going on.”
“We’re working on it, sir. We’re working on it, but it’s going to take time.”
“Oh, I’d forgotten how much I love this shit,” Jankowski muttered to himself as he looked around himself in VR. The sighting system colored all the IFF friendlies with green auras, while marking potential targets of military value with red auras as they roared down the highway.
The range indications meant some of those targets were at or over the horizon in normal vision, but the VR system, receiving continuous updates from the small cloud of aerial reconnaissance drones that preceded and flanked the column, had no such limitations. The world was displayed more in a ‘flat planet’ mode, where the horizon was no limit to what Jankowski could see.
He pushed his vision forward from the column, out over the spaceport and all the way to the Government Center complex that was their ultimate destination, his sighting system using the feeds from the drones deployed from the spaceport.
Wait. What was that? That must be those resistance guys. What were they up to?
Ha! Nice trick. He loved those guys already.
The human mind adapts to get better at whatever you do a lot of. Do a lot of crossword puzzles or sudokus, and you get good at them. Fret about minutia a lot, and you get good at it. Look on the bright side of things a lot, and you get good at it.
If you do a lot of VR, your brain gets good at that, too.
It doesn’t work for everybody, but spend enough time in VR and some people can ‘see’ equally in all directions at once. There is no ‘in front’ that you can see and ‘behind’ that you can’t. The same with ‘up’ and ‘down.’
The same thing happens with hearing. Some people, if they practice, can hear different things in each ear and keep track of them both. In VR, some people can keep track of four or five sound tracks at once, as if they had five ears.
Not everybody gains these capabilities, but some do, and these capabilities make some people much better at certain tasks. Like commanding armed forces in the field, especially in multi-pronged operations. These are the people who tended to achieve high-ranking field command, because these capabilities made them so much better at it.
In particular, Brigadier General Ann Turley had these capabilities. As the column sped down the highway toward Monroe, she could see her command vehicle from outside, behind her forward tank company of fourteen tanks. The twenty-eight tanks of her second and third tank companies were strung out behind, interspersed with the armored personnel carriers of her second and third mounted infantry companies. Her first mounted infantry company was ahead, at the spaceport.
Turley was also monitoring the command communications channels of her armored battalion, her mounted infantry battalion, her armored assault shuttle company, her aerial reconnaissance company, and her communications company, these last three being organized as her aerial assets battalion. She monitored all five communications streams at once as the armored column raced down the highway from the dam site to the spaceport.
The column was doing fifty miles per hour, the comfortable cruising speed of the M15 Imperial Marines main battle tanks. If the M15s fired up their diesel auxiliary generators, they could power the electric motors on the track wheels and shift the main drive into higher gears, but the fuel consumption went through the roof. Taking time to refuel at the spaceport, a mere sixty miles away, was not on the schedule.
Speed meant everything.
The Empire
“Whoa! What’s this?” Pan Shufen asked.
“Why? What’s going on?” Simao Mata asked.
“Look at this. The QE link to Julian just went down.”
Mata looked into the network map at the Empire’s Network Operations Center (NOC) In Imperial City, on Center. Pan enlarged the far western colonies in the map, and one link was black. Non-operational.
“That’s weird,” Mata said. “It should have auto-restarted. Try to restart it.”
“I already did. The far end is in shutdown, under local control.”
“Wait. What?”
“That’s what I said,” Pan said. “It won’t restart. It’s shut down from the other side.”
“But that’s not possible, Sue. The only people who can do that – override our control – are the Imperial Navy.”
“Or the Imperial Marines or the Imperial Police. Correct.”
“But that’s a western colony,” Mata said. “There’s no Imperial presence there.”
“Exactly. So what’s going on?”
“I don’t know. Have you ever seen anything like this before?”
“No. Never,” Pan said.
“Well, I’m going to find out. I’m sending a note to the Imperial Navy, asking them if they know something we don’t know.”
“Good. ‘Cause this is really strange.”
In his weekly VR meeting with the Emperor, Imperial Admiral Patryk Stolarz, the Imperial Navy Chief of Naval Operations, brought it up.
“The other thing I want to mention to you, Sire, is that the network people got in touch. The QE link to Julian is down. Julian is one of the western colonies. The reason they inquired is they can’t restart it. It’s shutdown in local control from the other side. The only people that can do that are the Imperial Navy, the Imperial Marines, and the Imperial Police. I’ve made inquiries, and none of us are doing it. So they’re at something of a loss to explain it.”
“All right, Admiral Stolarz. I’ll check into it.”
“Do you want me to do anything, Sire?”
“No, Admiral Stolarz.”
“Very well, Sire.”
“Shit. There’s another one,” Pan Shufen said.
“Another what?” Simao Mata asked.
“The QE link to Verano went down and it won’t restart.”
“Is it network degradation, do you think?”
“No,” Pan said. “It’s shut down in local control from the other side.”
“Again?”
“Yes, again.”
“I’ll let the Imperial Navy know,” Mata said. “Hopefully this isn’t the start of something bigger. Are all our redundancies holding up?”
“Yes. Those nodes aren’t in the same string, so everything is holding together so far.”
“Verano now?” Admiral Stolarz asked.
“Yes, Sir,” his chief of staff said.
“It isn’t us?”
“No, Sir.”
“And we’ve inquired of the Imperial Marines and the Imperial Police, and it isn’t them?”
“That’s correct, Sir.”
“All right. Thanks for letting me know.”
“Of course, Sir.”
To: His Majesty Emperor Trajan<
br />
From: Imperial Admiral Patryk Stolarz, CNO, IN
Subject: Verano
The NOC advises QE link to Verano is also down, shut down from the other side in local control. Not us, the Imperial Marines, or Imperial Police.
To: Imperial Admiral Patryk Stolarz, CNO, IN
From: His Majesty Emperor Trajan
Subject: Verano
Understood, Admiral Stolarz. I will look into it. Take no action.
They were sitting in the private living room of the Imperial Residence on the top floor of the Imperial Palace. It was a beautiful evening, and the drapes, sheers, and glass out onto the balcony were open. The business day was done, and dinner would be served in half an hour or so.
“I heard from Admiral Stolarz this afternoon the QE links to Julian and Verano are down,” Bobby Dunham said. “The NOC people are upset because they can’t restart them. They’re locked down from the other side, and neither the Imperial Navy, the Imperial Marines, or the Imperial Police are involved.”
“Do you think it’s begun, then?” Amanda Peters asked.
“Yes. Whatever little scheme you and Mr. Stauss dreamed up is apparently under way. I suspect I’ll hear from President Mieland and Presidente Elizondo this evening.”
“What are you going to tell them?”
“That the Empire is not involved, and cannot get involved,” Dunham said. “I will make no move to interfere.”
“I predict they will be less than pleased about that.”
“Oh, I can pretty much guarantee it. But you can’t have it both ways, relying on the Empire not to interfere in your little tyranny, but then step in when things don’t go your way.”
Peters giggled.
“I wonder if our friend Gerry knows,” Peters said.
EMPIRE: Intervention (EMPIRE SERIES Book 13) Page 11