Loralynn Kennakris 1: The Alecto Initiative (24 page)

Court
: Brother John Bates, is not that the morning which breaks yonder?

Bates
:
I think it be: but we have no great cause to desire the approach of day.

Williams
:
We see yonder the beginning of the day, but I think we shall never see the end
of it
…

Shakespeare: Henry V: Act 4, Scene 1

Prologue

Lakskya Compound
Lacaille, Praesepe Cluster

“Bravo, this is Six. Where are those goddamned
grenades?” 1
^st
Lieutenant Sebastian Gomez, commander Alpha team,
Nedaeman SOFOR 1, hunched in the darkness under an overhang of striated rock as
he waited for 2
^nd
Lieutenant Mike Ananian, Bravo section leader, to
respond.

“No joy here, Six,” Ananian came back. “The fuckers are
late.” Lieutenant Gomez was well aware they were late—over twenty minutes late—and
the unnecessary comment was a sign of the strain the delay was putting on Bravo
leader’s temper. Gomez’s temper wasn’t any better: his Op window was closing. Lacaille
was in a binary system and it would be half-light in another thirty minutes,
when Lacaille’s secondary broke the horizon. While it was just a very bright
star compared to the primary, the secondary would increase the ambient light by
almost twenty-five percent and Gomez begrudged every extra photon.

But much more important—critically important, in fact—were
his team’s extraction windows. The stealth corvette in orbit overhead could not
just magically appear and drop its shuttles at any time. It was a slave to the
laws of orbital mechanics and unless that goddamned convoy with the grenades
showed up in the next ten minutes, he had little chance of making the first
window. He could theoretically afford to miss it but that increased the risk
enormously, and he certainly could not miss the next. It would be full dawn by
the time there would be a third window and if his team wasn’t gone before that,
they weren’t going at all.

Everything had gone flawlessly up to now, to the point of
making Gomez a trifle nervous so he was not surprised when they finally ran
into a hitch, but the convoy being delayed this much was not a hitch he’d
foreseen. The plan had allowed a half-hour’s slack for the convoy to reach the
point where Bravo could track them. That was a generous window, given that the
trucks only had to travel five-hundred twenty klicks from the rendezvous where
the cases of grenades had been transshipped. At the truck’s nominal airspeed,
the trip should have only taken two and half hours. The corvette had verified
that the transfer had indeed gone as planned and on schedule—there was just no
good reason that convoy should be this late on so short a trip.

If there was no
good
reason, that left only
bad
reasons. Bad reasons meant going with the contingency plan and that meant adjusting
his deployments, so he checked them again. His people showed as light green
triangles on the topomap projected on his helmet’s faceplate. His own section—call
sign
Angel
to avoid confusion—was lying along this ridge overlooking
the compound. Delta section, with the three-man air-sliders they’d use to reach
the extraction point, was eight klicks to the north but just a minute away,
concealed in some dead ground where the terrain broke up into a series of
ravines. Bravo was over the horizon to the southeast and he couldn’t see them
on the plot unless he pushed the power past where he was comfortable.

A klick behind him on a rise to the east was Aries, Sergeant
Esteban Howarth, with his 15.4-mm recoil-damped sniper rifle. The big weapon
fired terminally guided armor-piercing multimode ammo in three-shot bursts from
a hundred-round magazine and had an effective range of five thousand meters.
Aries was his lifeline if—make that
when
—all hell broke loose.

He checked the time—eight more minutes—and eased his own
rifle across his lap. It was a standard assault model, firing 9-mm light
armor-piercing rounds in selectable bursts or full auto, with a 25-mm grenade
launcher slung under the barrel, a configuration that had served for centuries.

The rifle also had the latest tunable UWB scope with a
freq-hopping maser and automatic target acquisition, which incorporated some
technology invented since he was born, and which Gomez had turned off. He
trusted his own eyes more than any automated acquisition system and he liked
his gun set on manual for the same reason. Besides, all that fancy crap bled
energy and you could never be too sure exactly how good the other guy’s sensor
suite was.

Another minute ticked by and Gomez activated his command
link. “All units, this is Alpha Six. If package not in sight in five minutes,
we are
Buster
. Repeat: if package not in sight in five minutes, we are
Buster
.”
Buster was the codename for the contingency plan and they all knew it was
pretty desperate undertaking.

He really—
really
—wanted those grenades.

The grenades were not for them—they were bait. Bait
intended for a terrorist warlord named Nestor Mankho, asleep in the walled
compound three klicks down the slope and across the open flat below. Mankho had
been behind an attempt to bomb a series of high-profile Grand Senate hearings
in Nemeton last year and Nedaema had literally come within a centimeter of
having its government almost wiped out. It was the first operation Mankho had
mounted since the Black Army, an anarchist group he’d once led, had been
practically annihilated after they attacked the Nedaeman colony of Knydos in
the first years after the last war.

Mankho survived the destruction of the Black Army and had
spent the intervening years smuggling weapons, dealing in slaves, investing in
a few legit businesses (including the popular social-networking service Zeta,
that it was believed he used to ID targets for his slaving operations), and
eluding capture. Up until just before the attempted bombing, the conventional
wisdom had him knocking about in the Outworlds, but then the League’s Office of
Naval Intelligence had located him here on Lacaille, a Bannerman client in the
Hydra.

Current intelligence estimates held that Mankho didn’t have
the resources to mount such an involved operation on his own—a conclusion
supported by forensics—and the consensus among those who knew was that Mankho
had been working for someone else. The Dominion of Halith seemed the most
likely
someone
, but this ‘suspicion’ (as the Archon of Nedaema insisted
it be referred to) could easily tip the strained relations with Halith into
another war, so it could not be entertained in any official sense without
absolute proof.

The absolute proof was Mankho himself, alive if at all
possible, so the information could be more readily extracted. If taking him
alive was not an option, it was necessary to acquire his well-preserved brain.
Simply killing Mankho no longer served a useful purpose, so this Op had been
planned with meticulous care: NDIA had gone to extraordinary lengths to check
and recheck their intelligence; the trap had been painstakingly laid using
perfectly reliable, perfectly unwitting contacts and set with an irresistible
bait: a shipment of second-gen adaptive grenades.

The shipment was perfectly genuine. It could be—and had
been—checked and rechecked throughout its route from its planet of origin to
Lacaille. Gomez knew it had cleared customs at Kapustin Yar, Lacaille’s main
spaceport, right on schedule, concealed in drums of high-density
superconductive oil that was used in the Carnot pumps of low-power reactors. He
knew it had been loaded into a big air-lorry on schedule; that it had met the
convoy arranged between the seller’s Lacaille agent and Mankho’s factor at the
appointed rendezvous on schedule, and that the grenades had been swiftly
extracted from the oil drums and shifted into the convoy’s trucks.

What Lieutenant Gomez really cared about, however, were the
other
grenades that had been handed over at the rendezvous. When the delivery of
Mankho’s grenades was being negotiated, the seller’s Lacaille agent had
suggested to Mankho’s factor that they do a little side business. This was
perfectly usual: agents and factors always had their own business interests and
they took advantage of the logistical arrangements of larger transactions to
conduct their own. It was not graft in any true sense and the principles almost
never objected provided things were kept within certain well-understood limits.

In this case, the seller’s Lacaille agent mentioned he had a
few extra cases of grenades, a generation older than those in Mankho’s shipment
but still quite sophisticated, and he was having trouble moving them. They’d
been dumped on him, he explained, a result of another deal that went south—he
didn’t deal in weapons much—grenades were a difficult cargo—Mankho’s factor
had the connections to move them easily—he’d be more than happy to let them go
for a very reasonable price—in fact, they made him kinda nervous…

The sales patter was just part of the culture and the deal
that was struck—the grenades for a consignment of black Tajima-ushi cattle
embryos that the factor knew were unlikely to be viable due to spoilage—was
immaterial. All that mattered was getting
those
grenades on the convoy,
because the seller’s Lacaille agent was also a Nedaeman agent and in each of
those cases that were dutifully handed over for the cryocanister of embryos,
was a special grenade: a class-C EMP device. Getting them into Mankho’s
compound was the whole reason for the elaborate set-up.

Mankho’s compound was not a particularly impressive edifice:
only about sixty meters long and forty wide, with a three-story residence in
the southwest corner. But it did have a six-meter curtain wall and barracks
space for about sixty men, plus five light-armored vehicles and half a dozen
plain trucks. It also had a security enclosure, a perimeter sensor suite and,
of course, secure comms. All of these—especially the security enclosure—had
to be disabled if they were to have any chance of taking Mankho alive.

Security enclosures were proof against EMP, most explosives,
and they acted as a high-efficiency phase-conjugate mirror against lasers and
plasma weapons. They weren’t much good against solid projectiles, unless they were
military grade—which this one wasn’t—and they didn’t block most varieties of
snooping, although they did keep dragonflies and other remote sensors at a
respectful distance.

They were also damned unpleasant to encounter—sometimes
even fatal, unless you were wearing full battle harness. Since Mankho would not
be, it was critical to take the enclosure out and, of course, they also had to
ensure he couldn’t call in help from Kapustin Yar. Even though the government
of Lacaille had always vehemently denied Mankho’s presence, there was no reason
to believe they would disavow him to the point of tolerating an attack on their
own soil.

The EMP devices would do all that was needed, but only if
they were detonated inside the compound—or if the security enclosure was open.
That depended on how good Mankho’s security people were. If they were lax,
they’d accept the preliminary checks done at the rendezvous and wave both sets
of crates into the compound. But if they were doing their jobs, they’d scan the
crates.

In fact, the plan bet on them scanning the cases, but doing
it with the enclosure open. There were good reasons for this. For one thing,
opening, closing, and reopening the enclosure took time, was wasteful, and a
bit of a nuisance. For another, if the grenades came too close to the sealed
enclosure, they would explode. How close was
too
close
depended
on how sensitive the grenades were, so it was safest to leave the enclosure
open until they got them stowed securely inside. Unless Mankho’s people had reason
to be suspicious—or were extremely paranoid—it was unlikely they’d stop the
convoy far enough away to run their checks with the enclosure sealed. If they
were that suspicious, the crates should not have been accepted in the first
place.

As for being extremely paranoid, Gomez would just have to
see. He did have the option of blowing the whole load and attacking in the
confusion—Buster had envisioned that—with a decent chance that the explosion
would give him burn-through so he could take out the compound’s electronics
with his own EMP strike. That was not ideal, however: a
decent
chance
was not to be compared with detonating the EMP devices with the enclosure open.

So it was up to Gomez to pick the moment to detonate the EMP
devices that would take the enclosure down and render the compound deaf, blind,
and dumb. If anything happened to him, Bravo’s section leader would set them
off. Combined with the explosion and the attack Bravo would make, that would
give Angel section the minutes needed to snatch Mankho and then Delta section’s
air-sliders would whisk them all to the extraction point.

That was the plan, but he couldn’t execute it without
knowing where the convoy was. To get to Mankho before his people could react,
his section had to be positioned no more than a hundred meters from the wall,
and they couldn’t stay that close for long without being detected—the safe
estimate was less than eight minutes. Alpha Team’s combat armor incorporated
the best active camouflage Nedaema could produce, which made it very good
indeed, and it covered all bands from DC to daylight (if the definition of
daylight was extended to include soft X-rays).

It would take equipment a good deal more sophisticated than
anyone would expect to find on a former colony like Lacaille to defeat the
camouflage, even at the outside of the intelligence estimates. Lacaille, while
nominally independent, was still a Bannerman dependency and the Bannermans had
no sensors good enough to detect him or his people under current conditions.