The Iradathkin Imperium Navy Cruiser Charcoaled Sun pushed back into real space on the inner edge of Aligoya Poxei. Forty minutes later, a still slightly bleary-eyed Lieutenant Kaewer Jirvaerka, 278th Kidorlus found herself sitting in the Company’s ready room with a steaming mug of ronchio, the strong black tea that was the most common morning stimulant amongst draikers with Sub-Lieutenant Lorkei Stakara at her side, somewhat more awake than his CEO. Ship Captain Duma Plufore was sitting across the table with an icy cup of amab, the second most common stimulant in the Iradathkin Imperium, his own expression serious.
“Aligoya System Command just hit us with a priority request for assistant. Apparently, something is happening on Aligoyaka that local Virunos and Guardians cannot handle. The system governor is requesting the 278th’s immediate support,” Captain Plufore reported. “According to Aligoya System command, the local Virunos picked up lead about 23 hours ago on a certain Jarída Marán visiting a local Vanished Court cell but the lead was time limited and the Virunos chief decided he couldn’t wait for Order or Kidorlus support. With support of drawn from Guardians and the local Army garrison, they raided the Vanished Court stronghold eight hours ago. While they captured the majority of the cell without significant bloodshed, Jarída Marán and his closest supporters slipped the noose but instead of disappearing into the crowd, they decided to attack Shivun Interface’s regional headquarters.”
“Do the locals have any ideas why? What would a relatively backwater regional HQ have that an international crime syndicate would risk one of their higher ranked lieutenants this way?” Lorkei asked. He’d been on shift for the Charcoaled Sun’s Kidorlus compliment and had the benefit of being fully awake so, by unspoken agreement, he got to ask the questions until his CO woke up.
“The locals don’t seem to have a clue, but I received a very interesting call from Shivun’s main headquarters, routed through Admiralty channels, after confirming our arrival with System Command.”
“Oh maiso,” Lorkei groaned and almost buried his face in his hands. That kind of response time said very bad things about what was happening on Aligoya Poxei’s capital world. And about why the Vanished Court was apparently this interested.
“It turns out Shivun Interfaces has been working with several of its competitors on developing the new line of Interfaces for Fleet. They decided that letting a regional branch handle their part of the project would be more secure than bringing into the core worlds where everybody is logically watching.”
“And they chose the Yopile region?” Lorkei cut in. Kaewer agreed with him completely. Yopile, despite how long it’d been under Imperium rule, was still functionally a Developing Province for how stable the region was.
About a quarter of all the terror or criminal organizations in the Imperium could trace their origins back to the organized crime and insurgencies of the Yopile province. Nearly five percent of the Imperium’s total acts of terror took place in or around one of the province’s ten inhabited systems. It was part of the reason the Charcoaled Sun was out here in the first place. The Navy made it a point to keep an active Kidorlus presence in the region, despite the hot-cold nature of the war with the Dominion.
Plufore gave a shrug that simply said ‘civilians’. “It’s Imperium policy to spread out government projects to poorer or struggling Provinces on the theory that it’ll give them an economic base and help stabilize them. Yopile has actually earned its regular Provincial status, even if it is one of the hottest spots in the Imperium still,” He pointed out, for accuracy’s sake.
“Okay, but the local security should’ve been up to the task so, why is this a problem still? Jarída is a Sidhe Noble but surely the combined weight of the virunos, Guardian volunteers and active Army units could’ve run him down by now. They’re more experienced with counter-terror operations than a more core region would be.”
Plufore nodded and continued with a grimace, “Jarída’s group is apparently very well-armed and very good at operational planning. He hit Shivun Headquarters in the early morning, before it’s security would’ve been at daytime levels but late enough that at least part of the upper corporate hierarchy and engineers had come to work. They’ve taken hostages and active the buildings security measures. Very Important hostages.”
“Zarvok,” Kaewer swore this time. “I can’t wait for the locals’ after-action reports or the Governor’s annual review session. Someone’s head is going to roll for this sura. How do you let fugitives draw a bead on a high-value target like Shivun while on the run? Much less actually commit to an actual operation while still on the run?”
“Locals,” Lorkei shrugged his CO’s glare off. It was an obvious, and impolitic, answer but a truism that her Kidorlus had come to live by. Local virunos didn’t have the training or muscle to run complex operations against well-armed and prepared enemies. They were the policing authority of the Imperium, great at investigation and peacekeeping but that was about it. The Guardian Corp was volunteer reservists, intended to provide the planet with a ready population for the army to draw from in emergency and useful but they weren’t trained any sort of sensitive operations. The Army garrisons on most worlds weren’t much better, they just had bigger guns. All of which meant, that the people who were guaranteed to mess up sensitive operations were always the locals unless they were lucky enough to pull a Special Operations unit or pay one of the Orders for a team. Order-affiliated teams were getting expensive and unreliable.
“Duma, what’s our ETA to Aligoyaka from our current position?” Kaewer puffed out her cheeks as she connected her Interface to the briefing room’s table. A system map of the Aligoya system appeared.
“On real-space drives? Another thirteen hours. We came in out at the system’s civilian shift limit because we weren’t in a hurry,” The Captain shrugged again. Fringe-space got weird, and dangerous, the deeper into a star’s gravity well one got. The closest most ship captains would willing risk was several light hours shy of the star, thus every star had a “civilian shift limit” where the vast majority of the system’s traffic would enter and exit from. Other complexities like matching spatial “topography” of Real and Fringe space at a certain point changed the ‘difficulty’ of a ship’s shift between them. This led to cluster points of traffic as ever-thrifty merchants congregated at the ‘cheapest’ points of shift. Which meant pirates, and Fleet, clustered around these points too.
“Thirteen hours is too long. Jarída will get what he needs, kill the hostages and escape before that or force the locals to strike early and make a mess,” Kaewer stared hard at the star chart for a second and nodded sharply. “Right. Assuming the situation doesn’t change after my conference with the local security heads, I’m going to want a full-on assault approach. Which means, micro-shifting all the way in. Start getting the basics set for that. Warn the governor to clear the orbitals over the city, we’re obviously going to come in broadcasting our approach, but I don’t want an idiot to do something stupid and panicking if we get near. If he starts complaining or wasting time, have him arrested and have the local station commander do it. I’m being nice by giving him a chance to be a part of the solution.”
“Yes, ma’am. Combat approach, aye. Clear Orbitals, aye,” Duma snapped, stiffening in his chair. “That drops our approach to a little over three hours, assuming we don’t hit something in the Fringe that kills us all.”
“That’ll have to do. I can’t make the universe bend to our needs,” Kaewer gave the captain a crooked smile. “Lorkei, alert Karvusan Three, Nine, and Eighteen to prepare for operations. Get our Talons ready for launch and set your squad to ready alert. Basic mission loadout. They’ve got until I finish my conference with the locals, I don’t want anyone running around during assault approach. We’ll have a good fifteen minutes at the end of approach to modify loadouts at the end of the approach.”
“Ma’am,” Lorkei stiffened in brief acknowledge before putting a hand to his jaw, fingertips siting just below his ear with his palm running down the line of the mandible, the universal gesture for using one’s Interface.
“Well, I think it’s time I got busy,” Duma said sliding his chair back and standing. “You know how much paperwork a combat approach is going to generate don’t you?”
Kaewer nodded as she stood as well. “The fun part about being a Special Forces bus is that you get to break all sorts of regulation and then give me the paperwork. Let’s go give some traffic controllers heart attacks.”
“Karaide,” The Captain grinned. Kaewer chuckled, having the much older draiker using the current adolescent slang for ‘this is stupid, let do it!’ tickled her sense of humour.
—
Fringe-space was a strange place that eddied and warped around gravitational bodies, likes stars and planets, in ways that could kill a ship in an eye-blink. The deeper into a real space gravity-well a ship traveled in Fringe Space, the greater the odds that it would die, by running either into an unseen distortion or by having its Fringe Drive trigger one. So over time, a practical ‘mass limit’ evolved where most captains, even warships would shift back into real space rather than risk their ships. Captain Balakarin had pioneered the modern assault approach back in the 1844 of the 10th Age. She’d reasoned that numerous short shifts back into and out of Fringe Space along with hard real space maneuvers reduced the risks of running into or sparking a ship killing eddy or distortion to make the tactic viable. She’d been right, and her destroyer squadron had used the tactic to great effect, winning several key victories against the Soudathkins in the following decade. She’d also served as the example that reduced risk wasn’t the same as no risk as her flagship had been lost with all hands during an assault approach five years later.
A thousand years later, assault approach still sucked vacuum, even when you knew that there were no defenders trying to kill you. The newest generations of Fringe-drives could rip the dimensional barrier efficiently enough that most people didn’t feel the Shift-Sickness that’d been a huge problem for Captain Balakarin but too many Shifts too quickly compounded the effect. Kaewer could hear someone throwing up into their armour’s puke tube. She didn’t bother finding out who. There was no real shame in it and whoever it was would be miserable enough smelling vomit until they scrubbed their suit out anyway.
Modern sensors and system maps meant most eddies and distortions were navigable, but the universe just didn’t care. About fifteen percent of warships attempting an assault approach died to the environmental hazards of Fringe Space alone, another percent or two would collide with something undetected when shifting into real space and die that way. That didn’t even count the ships lost to system defenses. Not to mention it was impossible to maintain fleet coordination and cohesion during an assault approach.
Most sane admirals preferred the slow approach, shifting in along the mass limit and pushing through the system at real space speeds. They might use a single micro-shift for more radical fleet maneuvers, Kaewer’s mother had shown the advantage of using micro-shifts to rapidly maneuver reserve forces in recent conflicts with the Soudathkins but assault approaches in-force were rare. Fleet engagements rarely required haste or rapid advancement and no admiral wanted to lose fifteen plus percent of their fleet just to maneuvering. Assault approach was, however, quite useful for slipping single ships, or small raiding units, past defenders quickly. Kaewer had done far too many assault approaches in her relatively short time as a Kidorlus. Thank the stars that the dice of the universe had no memory.
She took the final hour of the approach to plan her team’s mission while strapped into a holding creche wall in her assault armour. Every dimensional shift rattling the battlecruiser as Captain Duma fought to bring every ounce of speed across the barrier both ways. Shivun Corporate Headquarters had given her the blueprints to her target, including the unofficial additions that the Locals, with a capital L because it was easier to think of the disparate groups as a single whole, didn’t know about. The Army garrison commander was feeding her the unified Legion Network of the all three agencies on the ground, giving her a constant feed of real-time information that flickered and fuzzed with every Shift. The transition between dimensions was about the only thing to disrupt Imperium FTL communications entirely. The Local L-Net was a poorly coordinated mess of conflicting systems that gave her a headache to sift through but access to it allowed her to see anything the Local surveillance assets did. Someone on Jarída’s team had locked out all external communications with the Shivun HQ, including its security network before their attack had even started. The Army commander was promising her that her best people were working on it but Kaewer didn’t expect much from them. If they hadn’t bypassed the lockout in the last four hours, another hour wasn’t going to make a difference. By the time the Charcoaled Sun leapt through its final Shift and began its twisting, diving and writhing maneuvers for orbit, Kaewer had finalized her assault plan and updated the loadouts she wanted the strike team to use. When Kidorlus’ armour storage and maintenance creches released their charges, it took her people barely eight minutes to correct their loads and board the waiting gunships.
—
Three Stealth Talon-class gunships separated from the hard-braking Imperium warship in a maneuver that overwhelmed their modest inertial dampeners. The gut-wrenching lurch of separation turned into something much worse as they twisted over their own axis and plunged toward the planetary atmosphere with their engines maxed. The many traffic controllers of Voimanudath, barely given any warning, were still scrambling to clear their flight path when the distinctively hooked gunships ripped through the upper atmosphere, plasma roiling off their shielding as they came. The pilots kept their dive nearly vertical, rushing to get out of the wide-open skies of the upper altitudes as if they expected ground fire. The wing pulled out of its suicidal dive a bare twenty thousand feet from the hard ground. The rippling roar of their sonic wakes blasted over the relatively empty continent as the gunships flashed over the city, setting windows rattling. This sort of combat approach wasn’t subtle. There wasn’t an engineer in the Imperium who thought a high velocity deorbit could ever be made subtle, just harder to stop.
The Shivun Regional Headquarters sat on the far outskirts of Voimanudath, enshrined in the middle of a large private wildlife reserve and nestled against the bend of a local river. Some hair-brained executives had decided to build the campus in the shape of a rose. A pair of buildings were the flower’s leaves, each large enough to be a smaller corporation’s main campus. A long, carefully manicured central avenue surrounded by the greens, reds, blues, yellows and whites of flowers and trees made up the rose’s stem. It connected to thorn shaped parking lots and landing pads. The main complex was, of course, shaped like a giant rose. The four central buildings melted into and over each other, great overlapping curves of building layering over each other in a mad design that showed its true beauty in the late autumn sunsets when seen from above.
“Bat One to Karvus Nine Actual. Ninety Seconds to target.” They were under ten thousand feet now and ripping along at several hundred miles per hour still. They could’ve gone faster but that would’ve complicated stage two needlessly.
“K9A copies. Relay to all in five.” Kaewer acknowledged, standing to face the cramped hold of the Stealth Talon, armoured legs braced against turbulence. Her assault armour whined quietly as its servos matched her movements, letting the one ton armoured suit move like a second skin. A really powerful and heavy second skin. “Look alive folks,” she called over the roar of the engines rattling the gunship. The three crows riding on various armoured shoulders laughed and called out encouragement as their flockmate’s flightless flock sealed helmets and initiated system’s final checks. The birds weren’t going to be dropping with the team, several hundred miles per hours was too much for any bird, even the vaunted rust raven to handle safely. Not even the silver helmed falcon, fastest known bird in the Imperium, could survive these speeds. Kaewer’s feathered bodyguards were her team’s reserves. They’d join the fight after the Talons landed in the virunos cordon. Not that anyone would’ve thought they weren’t in the vanguard from their antics.
“See you in a few,” Kaewer told the boss raven. Imugemare was a large rusted raven whose attitude was that of a world-weary matron. She was savage in combat but Kaewer valued the no-nonsense attitude even more.
“Enjoy your flight, Emerald Rust. Remember to pull up before the ground,” The raven laughed even as her two younger flockmates continued their war dance.
“I’m aiming for the ground,” Kaewer countered, voice wry. “Pitch, Furigido time to clear out.” The two younger ravens flapped to join their boss in Kaewer’s old seat even as she sealed her suits vaguely canid helmet with a quick mental pulse.
For a moment, everything vanished into nearly silent blackness and then the suit’s systems flared to life. Her Interface and the suit’s own displays and microphones meant she could see, hear and even smell better than her natural senses would ever reach, even with magical enhancements. Her armour’s onboard Fragment Intelligence, one of the non-sentient but extremely complex and sophisticated learning/thinking program that were the backbone of the Imperium, interfaced with her own Interface’s FI as it began to churn out data. Atmospheric pressure, gravimetric deviations, targeting solutions, suit diagnostics, and more. To Kaewer, the flood of data pouring into her subconscious mind always felt like walking out of a tight stuffy corridor into the crisp fall air. The seamless expansion of her consciousness and knowledge base was intoxicating, as her Interface and active Legion Network link allowed her to simply know everything the L-Net knew. Unlike the augmentations and implants of most non-Drailleon nations, which provided the user with easily accessible but explicitly external information, Interfaces and military FIs, worked with the user’s brain to create temporary knowing. For Imperium veterans, the confident self-assurance L-Net brought was a welcome security blanket and a grave threat. Since any active Legion Network relied on solely on information from active network penetration and integrated sensor devices and users, its knowledge was limited and fallible, but it always felt absolute. Smart veterans learned to distinguish between the two types of knowledge and understand its limitations.
The Kidorlus’ L-Net abruptly doubled and redoubled in strength as all twenty-seven armour suits added their own high-powered transmitters to gunship’s boosters. L-Net, as with all draiker technology, was neither magic nor science but something between and had proven unhackable and nearly unjammable, to date. Imperium military hardware designers had hated the very idea of ‘nearly unjammable’ and they had designed the Imperium’s armour and combat vehicles to correct the adjective. Which mostly meant building powerful L-Net boosters into everything with big enough power source. Kaewer, as unit commander, knew the statuses of every soldier in her command as assuredly as she knew the status of her right hand and her FI helped her manage and sort that information.
“All units in Strike: Silver in twenty.” Bat One, Kaewer’s pilot announced to the whole Kidorlus L-net. Her people finished their final armour seals and stood to brace with one heavy arm against the overhead handles. In the neighboring Stealth Talons, Karvus’ Seven and Eighteen were doing the same. All twenty-seven Kidorlus made sure to take extra care with the slim external pack attached to their armoured backs.
The simplest, safest, and most popular method for getting soldiers to the ground from orbit was to land them in shuttles or gunships and have them walk off the ramps into clear and secure landing zones. The only problem was the enemy knew that method too and they weren’t about to give any attacker the chance, or time, to leisurely land and deploy their soldiers. Eventually, modern weapons technology had made simply flying into hostile space with the best possible landing impractical. So military planners had been forced to get creative, which –naturally– had prompted defense planners be more creative, all in the eternal cycle of weaponsmith versus armoursmith. Kaewer had elected to one of the crazier ideas to get her people to the ground.
Imperium Assault Armour was a highly flexible platform designed to provide overwhelming tactical flexibility in any environment. While it did come in specialized variants, the Stalker Fox series was the most common, jack-of-all-trades system. Unfortunately, the trade-off for having an advanced, but highly flexible and reliable weapon system was its price tag and requirements for high-quality parts and pieces. Which made assault armour hard to mass produce, and generally a pain to maintain. All the things the Navy hated. However, the units who did get to play with these walking tank suits could get away with doing all sorts of crazy things. Crazy things people wouldn’t want to do to an actual tank, much less into themselves with only a suit of very expensive armour to protect them. Things like a low altitude, high velocity airdrop without a parachute. Into a building. Through four different small atrium skylights. Kaewer thought it was a rather brilliant plan.
“Condition Silver.” The pilot broadcast on the squad’s L-net. Her squad turned sharply to face the Talon’s rear ramp in a whine of servos and a clash of metal, golden armour flashing. A light strobed blood oker in warning as the heavy ramp of the Talon opened to reveal a sweeping vista of Voimanudath’s skyline. Wind howled and clutched at Kaewer, but artificial muscles ignored it with casual strength. Furigdio fluffed himself up against the hold’s sudden cold, huddling with his two flockmates as they watched their crazy draiker cousin get ready. Her Interface put a timer in the lower corner of her vision, a perfectly visually contrasting set of numbers ticking downward. Explicit information had its own uses, after all.
At five seconds to Gold, Kaewer added a last-minute message, “Karvus Nine Actual to Strike. Good hunting.”
“Gold! Gold! Gold!” The pilot shouted and her mission timer hit zero and began to count back up. Her squad surged forward in synchronized precision. Each pair vanished from sight as soon as they threw themselves from the gunship. Seven seconds later, Kaewer followed Privates Jalbystro and Chivin down the ramp and into the yawning sky at its foot. Her armour let her feel the turbulent wind that clawed and dragged at her as if it was her own skin. L-Net immediately began feeding her the location data of not just the eight others in her squad but all twenty-seven of her soldiers, the extra-natural sense an intimate embrace wrapping her in the warm cocoon of knowledge. Her flight path appeared in her inner vision, the visual hallucinations broadcast from her Interface as bold and sapphire lines. If she concentrated, she could see the bleached blue ghosts of her team’s flight paths.
She activated the suit’s repulsor field as soon as she cleared the Strixku. The plates of enchanted armour attached to her suit’s shins, forearms and back seemed to hum as they strained against her hurtling momentum. Not to reduce her speed, no, it was far too soon for that. Instead, her wild free fall leveled into a guided dive as she slid forward on invisible plates of modified gravity. About her, the Kidorlus formation shifted from its ragged and scattered rain of golden armored bodies into a bouncing and juking flight of golden gliders. Kaewer’s own erratic pattern, spontaneously updated by her own inspirations or her suit’s FI, endeavored to hold no pattern for any watching anti-aircraft batteries to predict. The added maneuver wasn’t particularly necessary this time, the terrorists didn’t have entrenched anti-aircraft flak or twitchy point defense batteries waiting to kill them, but it was regulation. Kaewer liked smart regulations and always tried to follow them, on the off chance it might encourage more of them.
Twenty seconds after jumping, nearly seventy percent of the city had flashed below and the unforgiving treetops of the forests that surrounded it were grasping for her soldiers. Kaewer braked hard as she flashed past a stand of particular pines and her suit pulsed the warning. Repulsors grabbed at gravity to slow her down in a wall of sudden G’s that dragged at her consciousness. The Stalker Fox armour didn’t waste space or power on inertial dampers. The ground below her opened up in a sweeping vista of manicured grass and artfully planted trees and the Shivun Headquarters rose in her vision. A small sphere exploded from the discrete shoulder launcher tucked into her armour’s right shoulder, the enchanted missile whipped toward it’s the pre-targeted skylight. The force of the launch knocked her into a swirling barrel roll as more of the spherical missiles rippled from the squad. There were four from each squad, targeted to clear their entry through the thin skylights of the Shivun Rose. All twelve missiles hit within a fraction of a second, vaporizing their targeted skylights, and much of the surrounding roof, bare seconds before the Kidorlus would’ve slammed into them. Debris and dust swirled as the armoured soldiers crashed to the floor with bone-crushing force. The large, angry profiles of the massive Varkantis Puncturer heavy rifles swept the room as suit sensors pushed through the visual clutter.
“Clear!” Master Sergeant Tavoik “Minks” Poras, CO of her second xylia shouted. Legion-net agreed with her, the networked FI’s not noticing any potential threats their organics had missed. Kaewer’s own FI launched its own attack against the Shivun Headquarters’ security net milliseconds later. Highly classified and restricted military code tore through the high-end civilian barriers like so much aluminum before a plasma saw. The cyber-attacker didn’t waste time trying to lift the emergency lockdown or bother trying to infiltrate the network to allow it’s real-space masters pathways in. Instead, it dove straight for the Shivun security network’s eyes and ears, ripping through firewalls and causing shorts to blow out defensive software. The FI knocked entire sections of the network into audio-visual loops and strangled any potential alarms before they began. Not that the series of rapid explosions hadn’t been their own sort of alarm, Kaewer admitted to herself.
“Phase two then,” Kaewer ordered with a sharp two-fingered come-hither gesture. Privates Jalbystro and Kesota jogged to join her, the two non-draiker’s armour very different her own. Jalbystro Stalker Hound armour was massive, a walking heavy weapons platoon in its own right, its helmet was even more canid to accommodate the carnaven’s wolf-like head. The avianoid halinwa’s backward knees had required his Stalker Fox armour to be even more heavily customized but the Private gained even greater mobility.
All three squads broke into their smaller component ‘xylia’s, or three soldier teams, to sweep further into the building. Each team had to clear two positions before rendezvousing for the final push. The Local intelligence had been next to useless for her team’s planning. The Locals had known for sure that there were six hostages and that they were somewhere in the main campus but that was it. They hadn’t known which of the four buildings that comprised the main compound they were in or where in any of those buildings they might be. So Kaewer and Lorkei had knuckled down to pour over the schematics and come up with twenty-three potential locations for the hostages to be. Phase Two cleared eighteen of them in barely two minutes.
Heavy wooden doors exploded before the charging mass of powered armour and carefully inoffensive corporate decorations crunched into scrap as her xylia used walls to redirect their headlong charge, aiming for the sturdiest seeming portions lest they plunge through. The xylia point switched at every intersection, the leading soldier covering the advance of their comrades in a pause just long enough to stab a remote sensor into the wall. The sensors hooked onto L-Net, anchoring the tactical awareness of the whole unit into secured corridors even as the soldiers raced past.
Kaewer felt her growing anticipation of combat twitch with each new sensor that activated. Every second they didn’t meet resistance settled a pit of worry a little deeper. The eighteen offices, conference rooms and cafeterias her people were clearing in phase two were the lowest probability objectives. They were necessary to clear but no one expected any serious resistance. No serious resistance shouldn’t have meant no resistance though. While Kaewer sincerely doubt any of the terrorists could’ve predict the arrival of a Kidorlus ship and company, the Vanished Court were hardened criminals, terrorists and ‘resistance’ fighters who understood basic tactical doctrine and basic tactics argued that every approach should have at least some booby traps on it.
The itch between her shoulder blades was grew as the strike reached their phase three starting points without any resistance. Either Jarída was far lower on supplies than she’d have expected, or they’d created a singularly nasty defense position ahead. Like in the elevators, Kaewer noted wryly as her xylia bounded to a stop before a bank of express elevators.
“Right, phase three. All units stay on your twos. K18 watch your back, you’ve got the worst approach,” Kaewer ordered, voice soft over L-Net. Her people didn’t waste the breath responding, they pulsed their acknowledges in the silent, wordless communication that L-Net allowed and got to work. Phase Three was a vice, her scatter strike slamming inward along multiple approaches to crush the remaining eight points. Given that these points were the most probable locations of the hostages and terrorists to hold out, Kaewer expected the resistance to increase. She was also willing to bet she knew where the hostages were, but SOP was SOP.
Kaewer and Jalbystro pulled a pair of elevator doors open each, artificial muscles barely straining as the steel security locks bent and tore free with protesting shrieks that echoed in the yawning eight-story pit. Kaewer winced, that sound was going to travel. Both soldiers paused to trio of sensor balls into the shafts. The little spheres bounced and rattled down, small movement enchantments jerking their ricocheting moving into an even more erratic pathway to avoid hostile fire while their visual and magical sensors pulsed, sniffing for hidden wards or explosives.
Nothing. No non-standard cameras, no wards, no explosives, not even an actual sentry or noise trap. Kaewer scowled. This was getting ridiculous. No one would leave a direct route to their rear unmonitored and they wouldn’t rely on maintaining control of the corporate security network…
“Surabai zarvok!” Kaewer cursed as a thought crossed her mind. “Lorkei, get the Locals moving now! Make sure they’ve got their most modern TrueSight goggles spread evenly and tell them to pay special attention to any sewers or underground passages. Tell them to watch for traps and someone tell my ravens where to find me.”
“Your ravens?” Kesota, or ‘Leaper’, asked on a local channel, more out of curiosity than concern. Karvus Nine had seen her ravens do far too many amazing things to doubt their effectiveness. The halinwas was half-perched in the elevator shaft, waiting for the order to take point.
“We’re facing a Sidhe Lord and a clever one at that. I wouldn’t put it past Jarída to have planned to suck the Locals right past him and flee out a quiet side exit while some low ranked VC patsies distract the cops. Hell, they may even leave us the hostages if he can get the information he wants. But we’ve made the VC’s life miserable in this sector for years, and if he gets a chance to knife some of us in the back, he may just take it. I don’t want him to have the chance.”
“And the ravens?”
“They know the stink of Faea magic. They’ll be better than TrueSight gear for watching our backs,” Kaewer said, nodding to Kesato. The halinwas stepped back into the elevator without hesitation and his two comrades followed several seconds later. The eight-story drop wasn’t a strain for Imperium assault armour, even without the anti-grav plates, but her team wasn’t aiming for the bottom.
The three soldiers caught the lip of the fourth-floor door with lazy one-handed grips that drove finger shaped divots into the hard metal. Armoured muscles and servos whined their protest as they dragged themselves into covering position, massive rifles angled slightly upward to fit. Jalbystro slapped a breacher onto the elevator door, hit a button and dropped back to covering profile.
The breacher glowed for a half second before cascading thunderclaps split the air and the shaft door vanished. Brilliant lights strobed down the hallway beyond in a wild cacophony of light and sound. Private ‘Leaper’ Kesota threw himself through the breach first, bounding and ricocheting off walls in the way only halinwas could as Kaewer and Jalbystro came up behind him, Puncturers sweeping the hallway. Her armour sensors went to full active mode, sweeping the hallway with enough infrared, magical and other energy to blister paint. Which they were doing, Kaewer noted absently, seeing a cheap decorative painting deform slightly.
“Main assault is go,” A voice said in her ear and Kaewer felt the sudden pressure of the general assault were pressing against into the back of her consciousness. She grinned and shot out an old L-Net sensor head spiked into the wall, not one of her people’s. The first sign of defensive action she’d seen.
Her team was headed toward the fourth floor’s central server room, the centralized local database. It was secure, relatively spacious, and the best place for a hacker to break through Shivun’s security. It had the added benefits of heavily reinforced walls, no windows and a single entrance. Kaewer could’ve breached it from any direction, no civilian secure room could be so well armoured as to stand up to military-grade cutting charges but the risk of killing the hostages was too high. Which meant she had to go through the front door. Fun.
Kaewer sensed the fire ward from about four strides away, her armour’s heightened sensors sniffing out the hostile magic. Two strides later, her own magic shredded the sloppy ward, devouring the spell’s energy in savage efficiency even as Leaper, twisting in a dizzying display of aerobatic skill blew away a waiting trip mine in a short burst of Puncturer fire that shredded an adjacent 3D printer. Then a heavy security door barred their path. Kesato bounced away from it to cover the adjoining corridor while he waited for his heavier draiker and carnaven comrades to remove the obstacle. Kaewer, a few steps ahead of the Jalbystro, lowered her left shoulder and ran harder, armoured feet pounding. Steel shrieked its protest as a ton of draiker and armour ripped it free and Kaewer bounced into the open-air workspace beyond, metal door partially shaped around her body. Her right hand twitched, bring the large Puncturer up and to the right as she fell. The open office suddenly roared with sapphire energy bolts, and the crushing crash of her landing as she fired. Pieces of flaming office furniture and bloody goblets of a Sidhe terrorist coated the far wall even as hyper accelerated shrapnel plinked off her armour. Kesato leapt into behind her, using a half-crushed desk as a launch pad to throw himself over his CO. His rifle phoomed its own sharp burst of fire and Kaewer sensed the second terrorist die.
Then the room exploded as the three anti-personnel mines hidden in the room went off. Shrapnel ricocheted off armour designed to take anti-tank fire and tore through cheap desks and workstations. Kesota launched a string of whistling curses in his native tongue as the explosive shockwave sent him tumbling through the air and through the remnants of an office’s glass wall. Down the next hallway in another open space, Jalbystro roared and someone scream cut short. Panicked light arms fire filled the area and then cut off suddenly. Carnaven liked getting close to their enemy. Especially in power armour, when the enemy’s light arms couldn’t stop them. Several more explosions shook the building as the Kidorlus assault hit resistance at last and Kaewer could feel the chaotic flashes of combat from all over the floor.
Kaewer tore the door off her with a sharp burst of power and started running again. Kesato burst out of the office he’d crashed into a heartbeat later, bursting through the remaining glass with a snarl. As the two of them passed into the next, blood strewn, office space, Kaewer slowed just enough to slap her carnaven comrade on the back of the head with careful strength. Jalbystro grunted, shook herself and loped after her CO. Kaewer shredded six more defensive wards, none of them particularly strong by draiker standards but then the Faea really weren’t much for elemental magic, over the next forty seconds while her teammates destroyed, or triggered, four more anti-personnel traps.
The six Faea terrorists guarding the server room hesitated when Jalbystro, golden armour slick with pale red blood of her first victim, rounded that final corner. Their makeshift barricades and cover, mostly office furniture that’d been dragged into a pile, might’ve been effective against the weapons the Locals had but against Puncturer, it was worse than useless. Kaewer and Kesato blew one terrorist into spinning pieces while Jalbystro charged forward, Puncturer roaring away. The carnaven’s free hand pulped a second terrorist’s head like an egg when she popped up to shoot even as her rifle blew a hole clear through a third’s. A fourth died in a gurgling crunch of bones as Kesato landed on him and the fifth had vanished in a spray of burned gore. The last terrorist knocked flat by the explosive fire screamed in terrified defiance and sprayed fire from his light submachinegun at the golden armoured monster before him. The low-yield bolts splashed against Jalbystro’s armour, defensive enchantments and high-tech armour shrugging it off, until Kesato shot the him.
Jalbystro tore the server room’s heavy door from its hinges with an echoing roar that vanished into the cascading booms of Kaewer’s stun spell as she leapt through the gap. Protective glass cracked and spidered as Kaewer bounced off a standing server rack. Her right fist lashed into the face of another armed Sidhe sheltering beside the server rack with thoughtless instinct. Bones crackled and shattered beneath the anvil blow of synthetically augmented xinon, the hyper-toughened alloy that was the secret of Imperium hardware, stronger and lighter than steel or even carbon fiber. Pale red blood and grey brain matter erupted into the room as the unfortunate terrorist’s head popped from the force. Kaewer spun backwards, snapping out a hard right back kick into the terrorist who stumbled stumbling forward from behind another server rack, clutch at her head. The kick practically tore the terrorist’s left shoulder free and the ruined ialar collapsed in gurgling death throes but Kaewer was already moving.
“Two down!” She shouted as a Puncturer roared in the confined space. L-Net flashed an update to the front of her mind, the other two xylias from her squad were heading their way now and her ravens were winging their way toward her.
“One down, clear!” Kesato shouted, and then the room disappeared. Eternity yawned out beneath her feet and Kaewer staggered back a half step, the sudden loss of visual focal points disorienting. Her armour’s internal gyroscope kept her upright but her head swum for several more seconds while her brain adjusted.
“Nacvin!” Someone yelled on L-Net even as her vision lit up with TrueSight alarms. Those systems were practically humming their defiance as they struggled to break down the illusion. A green wireframe outline of the room appeared, superimposed against the empty void that had replaced reality. The wireframe reality was only of limited use for combat, L-Net was generating the outline from memory so any changes wouldn’t be visible to her until her TrueSight sensors broke through the illusion.
“Hold your fire!” Kaewer snapped, “Civilian targets possible!” Her team was too well trained for the nightmarish type of panic fire popular in the movies and Interface games but even measured weapons fire from anti-materiel rifles like the Puncturers could kill the civilians they were here to rescue. Sergeant Ruax’s xylia froze about ten feet away from the server room’s entrance, L-Net showing her they’d hit the illusion’s edge. Jalbystro had had the presence of mind to step into the ruined doorframe, blocking the only exist with her lethal bulk.
“Lieutenant, do you need assistance?” That was Master Sergeant Poras, her third xylia’s commander. His team had been the farthest from the server room and hadn’t been caught in the illusion’s boundaries. His camera showed an empty hallway with Ruax’s team stopped halfway down it.
“Negative, secure our perimeter,” Kaewer declined, no one had shot her yet so Jarída was either interested in talking or stalling her while other terrorists came in to reinforce them. With both her other teams unimpeded, she was safe from dealing with the later options, assuming there were any reinforcements lefts for these cowards. Then, quietly, on her xylia’s private channel she asked, “Jal?”
“Two minutes,” The carnaven growled back. “Stall.” Kaewer’s own magic, while far more subtle and harder to sense than a normal draiker mage’s, was too similar, too familiar to Jarída for her to safely probe the illusion’s structure. Jalbystro’s magic operated on a dramatically different ‘frequency’, for lack of a better term, from faea or draiker magic. Many of the mages from those schools ignored it until it was too late.
“Impressive illusion, Jarída.” Kaewer said conversationally, turning on her suit’s external speakers. “I’d really love to know why our TrueSight gear hasn’t broken it to pieces yet.”
“It really is quite impressive isn’t it?” The voice was male, smoothly manicured, and directionless. It had the self-assured confidence of a person used to being obeyed without question. “Be polite, Lieutenant. As much as I admired the imposing visage of your assault armour, I do not enjoy conversing with a faceless monster that’s just finished slaughtering loyal retainers.”
“I wasn’t aware we had anything to talk about,” Kaewer said calmly, her tone bordering on bored.
“I thought we could have a civil conversation, you know about places we’ve been and who we’ve killed there, but if you’d rather I could start killing hostages…” The voice replied with an air of suffering patience.
“You should know by now that the Imperium doesn’t negotiate with terrorists,” Kaewer chided, pointing her rifle at the ceiling and resting the stock on her hip. She meant for the physical softening of her stance to soften the outright rejection of her words.
“And yet, here we are,” Jarída chuckled smugly. “Helmet, if you please. I know your mother raised you better than this.” Kaewer sighed and opened her helmet, muting the L-Net chatter as she did. The canine visage split down the middle and folded again as the helmet parted and retracted part way. Kaewer braced herself against the familiar stink of death: of the stink of piss and shit from bowels suddenly uncontrolled; the tang of blood, acrid, iron-y or sulfuric; and the reek of burned flesh layered on each other.
“Better?” Kaewer asked with a flick of her neck length hair.
“I do so enjoy looking into the eyes of a worthy opponent,” Jarída agreed pleasantly, voice still directionless. “An Iradathkin special operations agent should be more careful with the word terrorist.”
“I don’t recall ever murdering children to scare their parents,” Kaewer replied coolly. “That was nasty, even for your low standards.”
“Business is business. There was nothing personal about it. You are far worse, child. When you kill children, you do it for the greater good. We are not opposites, just the shadows of different things. One more honest about its nature than the other. What do your parents think, young Jirvaerka, to have a daughter whose life is so dark?” Jarída laughed, not a pretty laugh but one that pretended to refinement.
“Quite proud actually. I’m sure you’ve heard about what my mother did to the Vanished Court’s little smuggling ring in Alqara,” Kaewer said cheerfully.
“I had a brother on Alqara actually,” The voice agreed calmly.
“I put together the intel that let my mom plan that whole operation,” Kaewer smiled, brushing a sweaty bang back from her forehead. “Probably put an energy bolt into your brother myself.”
“Ah, but that’s the fortunes of life and war. Well now that we are done with our… what do the carnaven say? Oh, right. Now that we’ve finished measuring who can pee the furthest, can we get down to business, Lieutenant Jirvaerka?” The voice gave a weary sigh.
“Jarída Marán, use my family’s name a third time and you will not like the results,” Kaewer growled. The weave of the world wobbled six times; the pulse of magic very strange but intimately familiar to her senses. Sixty more seconds. Ancestors Above, this was good magic. Jarída must’ve be leaching power from the local grid to make it this strong. How he’d managed that, the virunos were going to have fun unravelling.
“Ah, the young one knows our legends. Perhaps she fears the truth?”
“This young one knows the truth as well, trickster. I just won’t tolerate the insult.” Her Interface, which had kept its connection to L-Net, flashed a new visual in front of her. It was the relatively poor quality of an armour helmet camera, Poras’ to be specific. The video showed three black shapes racing over his head and down the hallway. All three hit the illusion’s outer edge without a flutter and flew past Ruax’s cautiously halted team with mocking flits of their wings. “I believe you wanted to talk, sidhe.”
“I seek a parlay. The virunos’ blundering raid on our local cell was an inconvenience. They caught some low hanging fruit and some spectacular fools whose capture jeopardized eight months of planning, but our plans are flexible. Your team dismantled that same plan, and kill twenty of this world’s best underground shooters, in little over a minute but you still failed. I still have the hostages. So, let’s talk.”
“You’re not getting any schematics,” Kaewer told the empty air bluntly.
“What are schematics?” Jarída dismissed airily. “I seek life and freedom, a continuation of this grand game of cat and mouse not simple money. I’ll even tell you who sold us the trick to swamp your TrueSight gear if you just let me and mine walk away. I know you have the authority, Lieutenant.” Something silent and black brushed past her, a ghost of movement and air swallowed quickly by the Sidhe’s magic. Kaewer ordered her face to keep itself bored. If Jarída’s magic was working like it should, he wouldn’t have even noticed the ravens’ silent passage.
“If I let you walk away, the blood of every innocent you kill, or order killed, afterward would be on my conscious. I like my blood debt to be mine and not anyone else’s.” Kaewer grinned as rust-coloured silhouettes began to burn in the void, her ravens lighting the false darkness with their own tricks. Still no reaction. Traditional mages really were horrible about detecting wild magic, Kaewer thought with a mental shake of her head. Sloppy.
“What a naively quaint idea for a spec ops officer like youse-” One of the raven’s dropped suddenly, plummeting to land on someone’s shoulder across the room.
Kaewer didn’t hesitate. She pivoted sharply, aiming just down and to the right of the rust-red outline in a scything horizontal burst. Sapphire energy tore the artificial darkness with the echoing phooms of energy bolt fire. The raven silhouette tossed itself into the air almost before she fired and Kaewer didn’t see her bolts drive home. Jalbystro gave a roar of triumph. Crimson magic spider webbed through the void for a fraction of a second before the illusion shattered. Kaewer found herself aiming at the ruins of a server rack in front of her, a line of gaping holes blasted clean through it and its next three sisters.
“Go for the eyes! Missed me! Too slow!” The mocking battle cries of her ravens and answering gunfire pushed her into motion a second later. Her helmet slammed shut on emergency activation as she pulsed her anti-gravity booster the wrong way. Two full gravities pulled her suddenly in a forty-degree angle away from the floor. A server rack, undamaged, exploded as a ton of armour and draiker vaulted through it, smashing through a second rack and bouncing hard off the ceiling as she cleared obstacles.
Kaewer fired in the frozen instant at the top, just able to see a quad of lightly armoured figures who flailed or fired pistols at the trio of attacking ravens. Three of the terrorists died in the next instant, their torsos vanishing in a sapphire flash and the acrid smoke of burned flesh. The fourth, somewhat better dressed than his comrades, spun with a scream as she put an energy bolt through his left hand, vaporizing the gun and adjoining flesh in a flash of sapphire. Then she was falling again, normal gravity and physics asserting itself as she crushed a third server rack in a sprawl of limbs. Artificial muscles tore themselves free of the light steel and polymer of the entangling server rack as Kaewer leapt to her feet. She abandon the heavy rifle, pulling out her Fracture pistol from its thigh compartment as she ran.
Jarída, for the well-dressed terrorist could be no one else, was mewling as he pulled himself to his feet, clutching futile at the seared stump of flesh that’d been his left hand. He sprawled to the ground when he saw her, surviving hand lunging for a fallen gun. Kaewer kicked him as softly as she could but the force lifted the injured sidhe into the air and bounced him hard off the wall. The sidhe’s ragged scream cut off with a sharp whoop of air as he bounced off the bare concrete wall and rolled to a stop a few feet away.
“Oh maiso,” Kaewer spat kneeling over the suddenly motionless terrorist. “I better not have killed the wamikeris surabai.” Her helmet’s sensors pulsed, her FI checking the sprawled terrorist for the smallest visible signs of breathing and pulse. It confirmed that Kaewer hadn’t killed him, a very real risk when hitting someone in armour, and she pulled his feet roughly together and manacled them. The sigils etched deep into the golden metal flared she locked them. The manacles were designed to restrain and contain most known types of magic use, including Faea. Their effect alone was usually enough to paralyze a life-long mage but Kaewer bound Jarída’s arms behind his back with the more common plastic binding, then stood as L-Net showed her the rest of the server room clear.
“I’ve got five civilians here, one casualty.” That was Private Uancai, Sergeant Ruax’s halinwas xylia-mate. Kaewer’s heart stopped as L-Net told her his location. The halinwas shooter was standing on almost the opposite side of the room, right along the wall where she’d scythed a line of a Puncturer fire through several racks of computers and the inky concealment of Jarída’s illusion. Kaewer thought fast, accessing Uancai’s helmet camera in desperate thought.
The sixth draiker lay splayed at the base of the access console blood slowly oozing from a burned hole in her head. Her once light green tunic had a practical, affordable cut to it. Now it was torn, and blood soaked, the small promotional pin for a popular interface game glowing with mocking cleanliness on its breast. There was something wrong with her legs too. Something the fish-eyed helmet camera wasn’t revealing.
“Well maiso,” Kaewer sighed, levering herself to her feet. She hoisted the unconscious Jarída in one hand and stalked across the server room. Private Gilun met her part way, reaching out his free hand to take her prisoner from her.
“Hostages secured. Time to secure extraction route three minutes. Locals moving slowly and are wary of traps. Estimated count on remaining hostiles, three. Lieutenant, we received an Admiralty-routed gold-flagged com request for you about four minutes ago. The Captain is stalling,” Flaring Ember, Charcoaled Sun’s AI, reported idly. Ember always had overall overwatch when unit operated anti-terrorist missions. The AI was patient, meticulous and better at parsing complex data situations than any of the Sun’s meat-based crew could dream of and while L-Net’s FI’s could do its job, the team appreciated Ember’s personal touch. Gold-flagged orders weren’t quite direct orders from the Vinialvoalmi, the Imperium’s reigning head of state, but they were too close for any simple combat commander to feel comfortable about.
“Acknowledged Ember. Tell the Captain to keep stalling. I’ve got to make some more deposits to the nightmare bank,” Kaewer squared her mental shoulders, armour made it hard to actual slouch after all and rounded the corner. “Talk to me, Uancai.”
“She was tortured,” The squat halinwas rumbled without looking up from the young ialar’s body. “Cuts and bruises are too regular for a fight and her legs have been broken several times. Carefully too.” Kaewer squatted to get a better look as Uancai pointed with a metal finger at the tech’s legs whose wavy deformation was sickeningly clear to Kaewer now. An angry charred hole on her upper thigh added to the list of injuries.
“That gunshot is at least a few hours old too,” Kaewer took a deep breath inspected the corpse and then this little corner of the server room. A line of blackened craters pocked the wall, stopping about four feet to her left. To her right, lay five bound hostages now being aided by a careful, and unsealed, Jalbystro. Kaewer felt the tension melt out her muscles as she realized she hadn’t killed a hostage with her blind fire but kept her voice steady as she regarded the corpse. “Torture while under the threat of direct assault seems fairly extreme. If you told me these were fanatics on a revenge killing, I still wouldn’t buy it. So, what was these scum after and did they get it out?”
“Shivun manufacturers the next generation of military Interfaces. Any number of Wild nations would give up their entire treasury for the schematics on how to build the bachot’ things,” Uancai’s made a spit gesture with his armoured head adding a flick on the ground in lieu of actual spit. Kaewer nodded, acknowledging her subordinate’s explaining without agreeing. It was a clean and simple answer, the sort of motive that’d make the local virunos investigators and media happy. Kaewer didn’t trust the comfortable simplicity of the answer, she couldn’t quite make it fit the ‘freedom fighter’ narrative the Vanished Court liked to cultivate. Kaewer snorted and tossed her head, armour turning the small gesture into a full body roll as she chased thoughts away. Save the post-analysis for after the mission, raven brain she scolded herself silently.
Speaking of ravens, Kaewer thought to herself, straightening as she looked around the room. “It’s clear,” She called out, returning her pistol to its thigh compartment and holding out her free left arm. “You three earned your dinner today, that’s for sure.” The three ravens left their hidden perches to drop on her shoulders and arm with rattling laughs.
“Imugemare wanted to remain outside but Pitch convinced her you needed help,” Furigido reported as he settled on her left shoulder.
“A building is no place for a raven.” The boss raven snapped at the air casually.
Pitch laughed from Kaewer’s wrist, the energetic bird’s favorite perch, “Was that a Sidhe again? Their magic is so silly!” He flapped his wings in a bird war dance. Kaewer laughed, one eye still on her helmet’s HUD as she tracked the Local’s assault’s progress. The Locals bolstered by one of her own squads were making better than anticipated time.
“Get the civvie’s ready to move. We’ve got a minute before our exfiltration corridor is secured,” She barked, recovering her own heavy rifle from the server rack it’d lodged in. Her ravens scattered again, perching themselves in the dim half-lit shadows of the battered server room.
“Lieutenant, the Captain is running out of stalling tactics,” Flaring Ember broke into Kaewer’s com-net again. “The situation appears nominal. You can spare a moment for this call. It does seem important.”
Kaewer sighed mentally but took a second to review the tactical situation. She made a face. Flaring Ember was right, of course. Unless something dramatic was waiting in the wings, the situation was firmly under control.
“Lorkei, I have a gold-flagged comm request from the Admiralty that doesn’t want to wait,” Kaewer said, opening the private channel with her second-in-command. His own squad was halfway across the building and two floors higher up, having cleared their own phase three objectives with minimal resistance. “I’m going to pass operational command off to you.”
“Got it,” Her XO chuckled. “Have fun with that.”
“All Kidorlus Units, this is Sub-Lieutenant Stakara, Lieutenant Jirvaerka has passed operational command to me. Sergeant Ruax, you have Karvus Nine tactical command.”
Kaewer tuned out Lorkei’s rapid instructions as he assumed overall command and reopened her link to Flaring Ember. “Alright, Flaring, patch whoever this suradec is through to me.”
“Yes Lieutenant.” A new icon appeared on Kaewer’s HUD and she opened the call with a thought.
“Lieutenant Jirvaerka online. You’re interrupting an active Kidorlus operation right now, so just what in the Stars is so important it can’t wait another twenty minutes?” Kaewer answered, not bothering to conceal her annoyance. She might be only lieutenant, but her mother was the head of the Imperium’s navy. A little acerbic attitude, even if the person on the other end was a flag officer, wasn’t going to hurt her career overmuch.
“Lieutenant Jirvaerka, Agent Forial, Trip-I. I apologize for the intrusion, but I need your team immediately. My contacts pulled some strings to route my call through the Admiralty in the hopes that I could get to you faster but Captain Plufore was insistent you were unavailable.”
“Oh maiso, it’s a Trip-I operative,” Kaewer sent the thought to Lorkei with the hint of a wince for emphasis. He sent his amusement back as a response.
“Agent, surely there are other Kidorlus in your sector that you could’ve called. I’m sure you’re aware that my portion of the 278th is currently deployed in an active operation on Aligoyaka. Even if you’re in Yopile, we are not the most convenient Kidorlus to get ahold of,” Kaewer kept her tone reasonable and her retort logical.
“No, I need your team, Lieutenant,” Agent Forial said. Kaewer frowned. Something about the way he said it… she shook her head, shrugging off the concern for the moment.
“Unless you’re in Aligoya Poxei, as soon as possible is going to be a couple of days at best, Agent Forial,” Kaewer pointed out, “Physics are physics. Stars, even if you were in Voimanudath itself, we’d still be a couple of hours before we could support you. It takes time to disengage from an anti-terror operation.”
“I’m in-system, Lieutenant but the issue I need your help with isn’t. I’m aboard the Crossing Dawn out of Tiralsyi Poxei. As soon as I realized where you’d be, I hopped on the soonest Stellar Verge and headed this way. I wasn’t expecting to find you already in-system and deployed though.”
“Where’d I’d be? Agent, not even a Trip-I operative should have accurate data on Kidorlus patrol routes in a region as chaotic as Yopile. I’m going to need you to explain exactly how you got that information, and I’m going to need you to do it right now.”
“I… can’t. Not over the Pulse-Net. Even on a gold-flag secure line I managed to… borrow… from the Admiralty. But we have a mutual friend, Lieutenant. One that told me if I ever needed my posterior pulled out of the fire, I should find a Jirvaerka.”
“A mutual friend?” Kaewer knew a lot of people. Her parents knew even more and a fair number of them would swear by the family’s ability to pull people out of the fire when it looked impossible. How many were mixed up with the Imperium Intelligence Institute though? The Institute was the Imperium’s premier civilian intelligence agency, focused on investigation, counter-intelligence and non-military foreign intelligence gathering. Generally speaking, the Trip-I provided background data and support for the military but stayed out its way.
“Yes, Lieutenant. One of my mentors. Always reminded me of a mountain’s sewer, if that makes any sense.” Kaewer froze, her eyes narrowing. Agent Forial had managed that weird metaphor casually, almost absently but it was a phrase she knew. A phrase she’d never expected a stranger to use.
“I find that singular description very… accurate, Agent. Our mutual friend has earned you an audience. We’ll see you when you hit orbit. Our planetary engagements should be wrapped before that,” Kaewer said.
“Thank you, Lieutenant,” Forial said after a long pause. “I look forward to seeing you. Forial clear.” Kaewer nodded sharply as the connection cut and opened her channel to Lorkei.
“Lorkei, I’m ordering a recall. I want us in the air within the next two hours. I’ll chat with the locals, but I need us moving as soon as physically possible.”
“What’s up, boss?”
“There is an alleged Trip-I operative aboard the Crossing Dawn who claims to need our help.”
“So? The Trip-I is always asking for our help.”
“He insinuated that he knows Uncle Rowan. Dropped a very specific family code phrase too.”
“Boss, I know your family is… well, it’s the Jirvaerkas, but you can’t break Kidorlus standard-operating-procedure because of a family code- phrase from a stranger.”
“Uncle Rowan is a senior Trip-I operative, very senior, and the code phrase this ‘Agent Forial’ used is a bad one. Redeploy Imperium Fleets bad if he used it on my mother bad.”
“Oh… uh…” Lorkei swallowed audibly. “If that’s the case, I’ll get started.”
“Thanks,” Kaewer chuckled. “I’ll contact Captain Duma and traffic control. We’re going to be in a hurry on our way out.”
It took almost the entire two hours to soothe the local authorities and get her people disentangled from the post-operation mess that always followed an anti-terror operation. But her people stomped up the ramps of their waiting gunships with minutes to spare. The veteran Kidorlus locked themselves firmly into their shock frames as the gunships’ engines howled and the wing leapt airborne. They weren’t about to burn plasma sheaths like they had on their descent, but their pilots were about to break all of traffic control’s ordinances again. High overhead the Charcoaled Sun fired her own engines and broke out of her parking orbit. She too was violating traffic control’s ordinances, but her burn wasn’t very hard, yet. Forty-five minutes later, the wing of gunships practically crashing into the hangar’s docking claps, which were thankfully designed for such rough treatment, as the Charcoaled Sun accelerated toward an intercept with the Crossing Dawn.