War in Heaven (73 page)

‘Morag, if you could just tell us a little more about how you think you will do this,’ Pagan said
.

‘Same principle as doing the data raid on Demiurge – I’ll stealth it. It’s Themtech, which means it has a mind or rather lots of different tiny minds.’

‘Like Essex,’ Mudge said. We ignored him
.

‘Operation Spiral,’ Pagan pointed out
.

‘I know how to do the interface and I will have Ambassador helping me.’

‘I’m sold,’ I said
.

‘You’re just eager to fuck the Black Squadrons up,’ Merle said. I couldn’t be bothered to argue with him
.

‘Look, no offence,’ Cat said, ‘but I don’t want to base this op on optimism and overconfidence.’

‘Cat, we’ve had this conversation with Morag several times. I’ve been in your position and she’s always delivered,’ I said
.

Annis looked over at me and smiled. It wasn’t very comforting. I felt like I was about to be eaten
.

‘And I’ve hacked Themtech before,’ Annis added
.

‘No, you’ve surfed it. There’s a difference,’ Pagan pointed out. My grasp of IT was pretty poor but he was right
.

‘We adapt the Pais Badarn Beisrydd, and they’re not even going to know we’re there.’

‘Then why not use it as a way in?’ Merle asked
.

‘Because it’s a trick we’re only going to get to play once,’ she told him
.

We broke the surface of the water, weapons covering every angle, moving swiftly out of the natural rock pool and onto bloodied ice. This was where the leopard seals lived. Evidence of their handlers feeding them meat was smeared all over the ice. Much of the meat looked human in origin. I tried not to think about it. Human lives had always been tossed away casually, but food for guard fauna? That was taking the piss.

We advanced quickly. We didn’t have a great deal of time. The moment the seals returned, the mission was over. Rannu and Merle had already programmed their dive sheaths to peel off. We’d hide their sheaths with ours. They advanced past our cordon of guns in their reactive camouflage. I could just about make out the movement of them slinging their weapons and pulling ice axes from clips on their webbing. I peeled off my own sheath, moved forward and pointed my SAW up the ice wall, as did Pagan, covering the pair of them as they started to climb the shifting, fragile and unsteady ice. Merle made quick time. Rannu was slower. His capture and possession had taken their toll, just as they must have on me.

At the top I knew Rannu would take a covering position while Merle rigged and dropped three ropes for the rest of us. Cat, Pagan and Morag were the next up, using muffled motorised ascenders to pull them up with only a minimum of falling ice. Finally it was Mudge’s and my turn. With cover from above we attached our ascenders and started up the wall. We’d attached crampons to our boots and were practically walking up the ice trying not to knock any off. We gathered the excess rope with us as we climbed. We wanted to leave as little trace of our progress as possible.

Pagan and Morag were covering our ascent. At least I assumed they were. I could see nothing as they were wearing reactive camouflage and were presumably completely still against the ice. I heard one of the seals flop out of the water and onto the ice below us. I stopped my ascender; a moment later Mudge’s went quiet as well. I stayed very still, hoping that the reactive camouflage would hide us. Hoping that we’d hidden the dive sheaths well enough. I glanced down and I saw one of the huge, sleek, vicious-looking augmented seals flopping around among the blood and food remains. There was nothing to do but wait and hope.

I was getting nervous, almost shaky. Something was different. Everyone gets scared, unless they’re a psycho or have had too much meat replaced with metal, but this was different. I wasn’t handling this reasonably low-stress situation well. I did a mild sedative from my internal drugs reservoir to calm me down. This wasn’t good. How much damage had they done to me? I wished I’d asked Mudge to score me some Slaughter.

There was a splash below. I glanced down to see the pool rippling. The seal had cocked its head and was looking at the water. I think someone had thrown something from above. The seal waddled rapidly to the edge and then slid into the pool, disappearing below the surface. It didn’t seem very bright. Mudge and I quickly and quietly finished our ascent.

‘There’s only so far we can stealth. As soon as we’re compromised it’s all over,’ Merle said
.

‘Not if they’re worried about other things and not if you’ve got fire support,’ Mother said. Tailgunner, resplendent in his feathered cloak, glanced over at her worriedly
.

‘That’s a …’ Cat started. She didn’t say death sentence. The Citadel was basically a minor arcology, or to put it another way, a fortress of ice the size of a small city and very heavily defended. It was designed to withstand a prolonged siege from Them
.

‘So don’t fuck it up,’ Mother said grimly. I wondered if this was what I’d seen the
whanau
talking about
.

‘You’re a mech down,’ Merle said
.

‘Soloso used to pilot mechs in the mines. We’ve been bringing him up to speed,’ Mother told us. Even on Annis’s horrible face I could see a look of worry. ‘What we’ll need is accurate info, which means good forward observation.’

‘We’ll be comms black,’ I said
.

Tailgunner shook his head. ‘No, we’ve got an idea about that.’

‘Rannu and I can FO,’ Pagan said. It made sense, as an ex-RASF combat air controller he had the most experience
.

Few things make you feel less like a hardened combat cyborg commando than wearing adult diapers. They may have been made from the latest smart fabric. They may lock all the moisture away from your skin. They may in fact be the very pinnacle of modern nappy technology, but despite the initial warm feeling there’s something deeply pathetic about a grown man pissing himself whatever the reason. It may be part of the discipline of running long-term OPs, sniper stalking or in this case a difficult infiltration. That didn’t make it any better. At least we’d taken something to constipate ourselves and eaten high-energy food sparingly the day before.

The Citadel was ahead of us. It was a flat-topped terraced pyramid. Large though it was, the cavern it was in dwarfed it. This meant a lot of open space all around the arcology, which provided clear fields of fire. There were also only a few ways into the large cavern, which would further bottleneck any attack. We knew that each of the terraces was basically a heavily defended trench made of super-hardened ice. Even from here I could see the various weapon systems – cannon, missile batteries, point-defence systems – bristling from the pyramid-shaped complex. Fully magnifying my lenses, I could make out combat drones circling the fortress as well as patrolling gunships and exo-armour squads.

What the fuck were we thinking? I started to shake again. I had to get this under control. We had a long way to go. I dropped the high magnification and the Citadel became a glow in an otherwise dark cavern.

There was no wild fauna on Lalande 2 with the exception of a few hardy rats that had adapted to the high G and were frankly terrifying. Rats shouldn’t have that much muscle. That meant that the Citadel’s defenders could surround it with motion detectors and motion-triggered anti-personnel mines, as well as much larger anti-armour mines. The anti-armour mines wouldn’t bother us but they would be a problem for the mechs.

They had EM, heat and sound sensors as well as security lenses, but if we triggered them we deserved to fail. The problem was always going to be the motion sensors. There was only one way to trick them and that was to move very, very slowly. This meant that a journey of just over a mile was going to take us the better part of twenty-eight hours of crawling over cold stone, hence the inevitability of wetting myself. This would take incredible co-ordination and discipline, as we wouldn’t even be able to see each other. We also needed to map the anti-armour mines for the mechs. Our initial movement was around the edges of the cavern so we could start from the
whanau
’s entry point.

It was long, it was cold and it was boring. The highlights of the crawl were exo-armour or drone patrols passing overhead. They always made it easier to piss yourself. I was on downers to deal with the constant tension. As soon as we got close I’d have to counteract the downers with stims. I only hoped that nothing happened before then, as the downers would affect combat performance until I stimmed myself. All we had to look forward to on this miserable crawl were cold rations and the thrill of occasionally bumping into each other.

I had a lot of time to think about the insanity of what we were doing, thinking thoughts that would fuck me up. Not the sort of thoughts I would normally think while operational. I was worried I would set off the motion detectors if I got the shakes. The Citadel grew larger and larger in my vision as we inched closer. The closer I got, the more I could see the weapons, the men, the machines, and the more I realised the futility of what we were trying to do.

Rolleston had done a good job on me. I wondered how Rannu was holding up. I had betrayed these people once. I wasn’t going to do it again. It was my responsibility to them that kept me moving. That was how I dealt with it. Kept me crawling over the smooth stone between the mines and sensors. Concealment wasn’t required, as they had achieved near-total area denial. Or so they thought. Fortunately they hadn’t reckoned on anything as stupid as what we were planning.

I also knew that what the
whanau
were going to do had to count for something. I wondered how they could operate with the near total certainty of death.

‘They’ll know we hacked them,’ Cat said. This was good. This was her job – to come up with as many objections as possible so we could overcome them
.

‘We need to make it look like something else and we need to knock out all visual surveillance in the lower boardroom,’ Annis said. As she did she expanded the part of the arcology that showed us the lower boardroom. It looked a long way from our point of entry
.

‘Sabotage,’ I suggested
.

‘Assassination attempt,’ Merle suggested
.

‘We don’t even know if any of their command will be there,’ Cat pointed out
.

‘Sabotage then. I think we should take any opportunity to fuck with their machine that we get,’ I said
.

‘And take any opportunities for assassination that present themselves,’ Merle added. I had to agree
.

‘Not at the expense of getting the data,’ Annis said, looking at Cat
.

I glanced at Pagan. Even in his Druidic icon he looked subdued. I wondered who was running the Ungentlemanly side of the operation now
.

Cat nodded. ‘Agreed. The info is our priority.’

‘Even though we’ve got no way to get it out?’ Merle asked
.

‘Information always helps,’ Mudge pointed out
.

‘And currently we know next to nothing,’ Annis added
.

‘Okay, this is all pretty fucking slim,’ Cat said
.

‘We’ve been out on hairier,’ I said. Rannu was nodding in agreement
.

‘Okay. Let’s set up a full action plan and begin prep,’ Cat replied. There were smiles from all but the New Zealand contingent and Pagan
.

‘There’s one other thing. We need to do this fast. We’ve got next to no solid intel but it can’t take them much longer to prep for the attack on Earth,’ Pagan told us
.

Cat gave this some consideration
.

‘All right. If we’re doing this then we are ready to go at 0500 tomorrow, understood? That means if we need more gear from Merle’s caches we get it today,’ she said
.

Now we started to whinge. We were squaddies, that’s what we’re supposed to do. We whinged and then we went and got on with it
.

We were close now after more than an Earth day of crawling. Our internal heating systems were running low to mask our heat signatures. I was cold and I ached. I’d had no sleep. Counteracting tiredness with amphetamines, which made me jittery, and then confusing my mind with downers to counteract the tension.

Twenty-five hours in, things had stopped making sense, which was good. This meant I could deal with the imminence of possible death. I could hear the soldiers talking now and smell their food. Soon we’d be trying to kill each other. Shame when we had so much in common. Pity we couldn’t just go after the leaders, on both sides.

At least Rannu and Pagan had had something to do. They had plotted a line of anti-armour mines from the mechs’ point of entry to the Citadel. The plan was for Rannu and Pagan to rendezvous just before the attack and use the palm interfaces on their smartlinks to swap information. Pagan would also be using his smartlink and internal targeting systems to passively plot firing solutions for the mechs. Most crucially they needed solutions plotted for the point-defence systems. Pagan was also looking at the main vehicle entrance on this side of the arcology and using his guncam to record details.