‘If he’s doing the same on Molsin as he intended on Vachss Station—’
‘An SRS squadron is already en route,’ said Max. ‘There’s no time for undercover trickiness, nor an all-out invasion fleet.’
A full attack fleet would take a handful of tendays to organise at best, even with planners using time distortion layers within Labyrinth, and ships using odd geodesics to make the initial rendezvous.
‘But deploying special forces—’
‘Is under way, Colonel.’
‘Yes, sir.’ After a moment, Pavel added, ‘Zajac will love it, the old gung-ho romantic. Probably tell the Council how much he wishes he were going with them.’
‘And Whitwell may well disagree,’ said Max. ‘Unlike Zajac, Whitwell actually was special forces, back in the day. Saw hard action, too.’
‘He was? Not on his public record . . . Besides, I didn’t think we had much for them to do before now, apart from play hard in their training.’
‘Not since you became a department chief. But you’d be surprised how often in the past a swift covert action, military action, was the only way to avoid long-term misery.’
Pavel nodded. Seven standard years at his current level of security clearance, and there were still things to learn.
‘You know Roger Blackstone passed selection, Max.’ Aeternum allowed the explicit construction of sentences that were simultaneously question and statement. ‘His posting on Vijaya was overt, or reasonably so, compromising his ability to operate covertly. And in any case he did not want a long-term undercover realspace assignment. So he asked for the transfer.’
The selection process spanned half a subjective year, some of it spent in quicktime layers of Labyrinthine reality, for those who made it all the way to the final trials.
‘He’s turning out to be different from his father,’ said Max. ‘Carl would have shunned special forces, or anything resembling their work. Young Roger’s not on the Molsin mission, is he?’
Either Max was not keeping special track of the lad, or he was but did not want Pavel to know it.
‘No,’ said Pavel. ‘But last time I checked, they were considering him for the other deployment.’
‘The reconnaissance op?’
This time Pavel thought he detected a hint of false surprise. Max did know what Roger Blackstone was up to, Pavel was almost sure of it.
‘That op, yes. I don’t like it, Max. I hope they all come back from it alive.’
Max closed his eyes, thoughts hidden, then opened them.
‘It would make a nice change,’ he said.
Twelve silver-bodied attackers lay on the floor, terminated. Roger had put them down fast, and without emotion, largely thanks to the integration of his higher cognitive self – recognising the moistness of the corridor walls for what they were, areas of permeability behind which the enemy waited to burst through – with his reptilian core, the heart of every human brain that people disconnect from at their peril. The in-between portion of his mind, the mammalian, emotional part, had not been required; later he might process his feelings, but in the moment they would only have slowed him down.
Like any well-trained attack team, they had come from simultaneous angles. And so he had responded by spinning and manoeuvring, geometry the medium of his artistry, so that only one could reach him at a time, and he prevented those single attacks by pre-emptively shutting them down: defeating a tackle by combining a half sprawl with a driving elbow to the spine; collapsing a knee with a thrust kick, a fatal neck-crank from behind to follow; another knee destroyed with a whipping circular kick, a thumb ripping an eyeball, spinning the attacker into one of its comrades; then a blizzard of crunching, whirling, thrusting and smashing them, taking them out. Then it was done, and he could disengage.
Isolation period: 2:17:00 hrs
It was regulations: the holo indicated the length of time he was confined to barracks, prevented from mixing with other people – particularly civilians – before he could release his killing rage and act like a civilised person. But telemetric scans were clearly updating the system, because a second later the display read:
Isolation period complete
The safety precautions were standard for all personnel, but special forces were required to recover faster than that. In Roger’s case – he had a brief mental image of a snarling, long-haired warrior with axes in hand, then it was gone – he could snap the rage off when he needed to, or simply experience no rage at all, as in this ambush.
His attackers’ silver bodies melted into the floor.
‘Not as sloppy as I expected.’ A woman’s voice. ‘You’ve got better, darling. I mean, even better than before.’
Corinne, his on-off lover since Tangleknot days, entered the corridor.
‘Hello, sweetheart,’ said Roger. ‘That lot was a present from you, was it?’
‘Sort of a welcome-on-board present, dear Roger.’
He had been heading for his quarters, with studying on his mind, when he had noticed the glistening walls and the attack erupted into whirling violence.
‘Is there something you’ve not been telling me?’ he asked.
Corinne was supposed to be Logistics Liaison, part of the support channel between the Admiralty Quartermaster Division and the civilian Far Reach Centre. Doing genuine work while spying on her fellow Pilots, a counterespionage role designed to detect attempted infiltration by any of Schenck’s renegades or – worse, because harder to detect – dupes recruited by renegade sympathisers and controlled via cut-outs. It had been a convincing story.
Lying bitch, he thought, and laughed.
‘I’m strategy and planning,’ she said. ‘Not combat.’
‘I ran twenty kilometres in training this morning,’ he told her, gesturing at the now-bare floor. ‘And did more pushups than I can remember. I didn’t really need another workout.’
‘That’s too bad.’ She made the raised-eyebrow, dipped-chin invitation he knew so well. ‘Because I had another endurance test in mind.’
‘Oh, did you?’
‘Mmm.’
‘Well,’ he said. ‘You know the Service motto: Always up for it.’
‘That’s not the motto, Roger.’
‘It isn’t? Then it should be.’
She took hold of his hand.
‘Come and show me,’ she said.
Nine ‘wings’ of five ships each played combat hunt-and-tag against each other during the tenday-long pre-deployment countdown, while in the barracks, the forty-five men and women spent their non-training hours clowning around, conducting ambushes with foam weapons and playing practical jokes.
Onlookers from other arms of the fleet were clearly disconcerted by the lack of serious demeanour from these legendary élite warriors, wondering just how the myths could have so distorted the embarrassing reality.
That puzzled dismay continued until an Admiral’s team of aides unwittingly brought live weapons into the visitors’ area: within three seconds, every one of them was face down, stripped of weaponry and petrified of the men and women kneeling on them and yelling. Several lost bladder control, which would have been hidden by modern garments, but this was a formal visit and they were wearing traditional jumpsuit uniforms, made of simple dumb fabric.
There was ironic humour but zero clowning on the final day, when the entire squadron slipped out of Labyrinth: the commencement of Operation Periscope, commanded by Ingrid Rhames, who chose to fly near the rear of the formation. The role of squadron leader was taken by Lee Nakamura, Rhames’ second-in-command; the others with experience approved of both officers, while the three newbies, Roger included, took their word for it.
It was a long and difficult geodesic, impossible for pursuers to follow and, with luck, impossible to effectively surveil as well. More direct routes were available, but none offered the chance of sneaking all the way to their destination and, if they were really lucky, making their escape the same way, with no one the wiser.
Only a tiny minority of Pilots and ships had the stamina, expertise and will to fly a trajectory like this; but no one in the squadron allowed their ego to surface. This was, in a very real sense, just another day at work. And that attitude was the reason they would win.