‘Area denial, area denial, area denial. This is the name of the game. I don’t care what you have to do. Destroy a whole planet for all I care. If we can’t have it, they can’t have it.’
UNAF General Gus Eisenhofer ahead of the infamous Ascendancy War campaign, Operation Black Belt
‘All clear, Fleet Marshal. We’ll be ready to begin the evacuation in the next thirty minutes.’
Scarcroft looked up from his reverie. ‘Good,’ he said, but his voice was muffled by the scarf wrapped tightly around his nose and mouth, and what sound did make it through was whipped away by the frigid, gale-force winds. Instead of trying again, he gave the man—a Marine captain, Roque—a thumbs-up.
Roque nodded. Beside him, an Alsatian, wearing an olfactory enhancer and begoggled like the rest of them, barked twice.
Scarcroft pulled the collar of his thick Fleet-issue trench coat up about his ears and looked out ahead. He was standing on the top of an ice bluff twenty metres high, looking out across a plain of snow currently packed with Titan heavy landers and Manticore troop transports. Naval-grade halogens cast piercing cones of white light through the blizzard, and backup beacons of red and blue smoke fizzed and spat, barely fit for purpose in the driving wind. He could just make out hundreds of marines below, trudging through the carpet of snow in their dull olive Mantix, helmet torches on full beam. Further in the distance, barely visible in what was fast becoming a total white-out, two huge tranches of provari civilians waited, marshalled by flares and metal barriers. Above them, a dozen ships of the 6th Fleet 15th Solar Operations Group waited in the low-orbit band, marked out against the cloud by turquoise IHD markers.
He’d been appointed to oversee the evacuation of ten Ascendancy worlds bordering the Omadan Sprint, adjacent to the Lower Vadian Spiral where the 16th and 17th crusade fleets had once marshalled. Ten Ascendancy worlds, nearly one billion provar. Even with the entire Cosmic Disaster Contingency Craft Fleet—which he didn’t have, since Francis Haps had half of it—it would take months to ship them all off-world. At least four, the latest estimates said.
And they had two weeks.
Well, Ellisburg’s briefing had been clear enough: prioritise, prioritise, prioritise. The backwaters, containing a third of the evacuee population, were to be dealt with last. The big cities, where all the useful provar lived—the soldiers, teachers, doctors, scientists and intelligentsia—were to be evacuated first. Anyone who caused a fuss, who put up a fight, who dragged their feet: they were to be left.
Scarcroft, who was used to nuking worlds rather than evacuating them, publicly found the whole idea preposterous, though privately he would admit that there was some logic to it. If the Kaygryn Empire was going to burn through the Ascendancy in as little as six weeks, as some tacticians were predicting, better to have the lion’s share of the useful provar on UN worlds. They could stick them all in the empty polar ice caps and give them all weapons. Better to have them defending UN territory than doomed provari—and if they were all killed, then who cared? Scarcroft may have had more strategic foresight than most, but he disliked the aliens as much as the common man.
‘Fleet Marshal, Commander Wolff would like a word, if you’ve got a moment,’ crackled his earpiece. The link was weak and tinny in the storm.
‘Tell him I’ll be right there,’ Scarcroft said into his comlink.
‘Aye, sir.’
He turned and trudged through the shin-high snow, much of which had been compacted to treacherous ice sheet by the comings and goings of hundreds of Fleet personnel clad in heavy Mantix suits. Beyond, bathed in the light of halogen lamp rigs, a prefab module sat in the wind-whipped mist, half-buried in snowdrifts. A solitary Goliath stood next to it like a sentinel, its armour panels arctic white-and-grey, maintaining a silent, vigilant scangrid.
He reached the module, returning the salutes of a few marines patrolling the perimeter, and ducked through the door. Inside, half a dozen men and women stood around a desk in the middle of the room, studying a holo. Most were wearing either Mantix or thick arctic warfare coats, or both. Breath steamed from every mouth.
‘As you were,’ Scarcroft said, and everyone resumed what they were doing. He pulled his scarf down and his goggles up. Commander Wolff, the ranking Marine stationed aboard the UNS Galahad, accosted him.
‘We’ll be ready to start the evacuation in the next thirty minutes,’ he said. His face was ruddy from the cold, and ice crusted his beard.
‘So I’ve been informed,’ Scarcroft said. ‘How many?’
‘Two million this week. Tranches Alpha through Delta are here now. Echo through Hotel starting in two days’ time. The rest by the end of the week.’
Scarcroft nodded. ‘Good. Very good.’ From the holo next to him, a rotating, three-dimensional map of Shaddai appeared. A small blue dot, indicating their position, appeared somewhere near the northern pole. Other provari settlements appeared as orange squares.
‘Lynx Two has already begun embarking,’ Wolff said, indicating the relevant settlements with his fingers. ‘They’ll be done in three days.’
‘And Lynx Three?’ Scarcroft said, pointing to a settlement two hundred kilometres south of their position.
Wolff scratched his beard idly, sending ice crystals tumbling into the folds of his scarf. ‘Still having trouble with theocracy forces. We’ve been hitting them with rail but…’ He shrugged. ‘If they don’t sort themselves out, we’ll leave them.’
Scarcroft nodded. ‘Fine. Don’t waste time. I’ll not lose men to this task. If they want to stay here, let them.’
‘Aye, sir,’ Wolff said. ‘No casualties yet. Most of the wetwork we’re doing is LOAS.’
‘As long as we can spare the tungsten.’
The holo view shifted again, to their low-orbit holdings. Ten fat-bellied UN ships were outlined in turquoise, their names appearing above in digital lettering.
‘CDCCs Protector and Nebula will be ready to debark after the first two tranches. I recommend they leave for Roma Vega ASAP. It’s only a ten-hour turnaround.’
‘Yes, let’s keep the evacuation rolling,’ Scarcroft said. ‘I don’t want these CDCCs getting jammed up. Tell me about the weapons caches.’
‘Roque,’ Wolff nodded. From behind Scarcroft, the marine captain stepped into view. A long-barrelled railgun, wrapped in white camo strips, was slung across his back.
‘We’ve located thirty ammunition dumps which we’ve got locked for LOAS when we bug out. We’ve set minimum safe distance IHD warnings; some of these caches are going to level ten square klicks.’ He manipulated the holo map, and a series of green icons appeared along the equator. ‘Our SPECWAR detachment is planting AOWs along elevated positions here, here and here, and along this ice shelf. Probably won’t do much, but word from the top is it’s the new SOP.’
‘Waste of good lasers if you ask me,’ Wolff grunted.
Scarcroft shrugged. ‘We’re mining the mid-orbit band; may as well make every world a bitter pill. By the way, I want all the crops destroyed by the end of the week, whatever that arctic weed is they call food. And poison the water.’
Wolff nodded. ‘We’ve got a few hundred tonnes of KCN to take care of that. We’ll soak the crops with gamma to a depth of five klicks. We’re waiting until we know we can feed the evacuees until the end of the week before we destroy all the food supplies. Fleet rations will only take two million mouths so far.’
‘Fine,’ Scarcroft said. ‘Good work, both of you. I’ll see that our Ascendancy liaison is briefed.’
‘Fleet Marshal?’
Scarcroft turned around. A kaygryn—Goyai—was standing in the doorway, wearing UN Fleet-issue arctic warfare garb. One of the dogs outside barked at it.
‘Yes?’ he asked. The kaygryn was a former messenger slave, fluent in Folhourtian Provari and Terran, forced to learn against his will by the provar. Now it was technically emancipated, or so the UN had insisted at the conclusion of the Ascendancy War, though it was now effectively one of Scarcroft’s retainers. It accompanied him wherever the 15th SOG went.
‘Overseer meng’Dama has informed me there is to be a blessing before the embarkation.’
The module’s occupants stirred, exuding a palpable air of irritation.
‘We don’t have time for this,’ Wolff muttered angrily, turning back to the holo.
Scarcroft was inclined to agree. Though no-one would say it in front of him for fear of sounding unprofessional, no-one was pleased to be there at all. The evacuation was a wasteful distraction; their time would better be spent fortifying and protecting UN worlds.
‘We have a lot to get on with,’ Scarcroft said to Goyai, wishing that the aliens would keep this silly nonsense to themselves. ‘Tell him we don’t have time for a blessing. If he feels compelled to offer one, he can do it on the Nebula.’
Goyai bowed. ‘Yes, Fleet Marshal, it’s just… he was rather insistent. Being a kaygryn, I’m not sure he will accept what I have to say—even with your executive authority.’
Scarcroft grimaced. He’d neither needed nor wanted the warrant of executive authority bestowed upon him by the Ascendant Feudality, a hardcopy scroll bearing the seal of the provari executor commanding this Prefecture. He’d given it to Goyai in the hope that the kaygryn could dispense with the more irritating duties, but it had evidently been wishful thinking.
‘For God’s sake,’ he muttered under his breath. He turned back to Wolff. ‘We’ll start the embarkation on time. Don’t delay it for this. I’ll speak to this meng’Dama myself.’
‘Sir,’ Wolff said, nodding once.
‘Sir, I should probably—’
‘Yes, you come with me,’ Scarcroft said, interrupting Roque, and the marine captain followed him outside into the blizzard.
The snowfall was increasing, and Scarcroft was forced to use his IHD to pick out a route as they waded through the thick drifts piling up around them. Roque summoned two men and dogs to accompany them, too, since the provar had started using analogue lymph-node bombs which their scanning equipment couldn’t detect.
They moved down the slope an orbital laser had cut into the bluff, standing aside as huge tracked vehicles shifted tonnes of materiel towards the Titans, and pushed their way through the banks of snow clogging up the thoroughfares. Either side of them, olive-green tents flapped madly in the wind, prefab modules accreted slush and snow, and marines and Fleet personnel moved across the sodden ground, shouting and marshalling and otherwise keeping their heads down in the wind. The air was filled with the cycling sound of Manticore engines keeping warm in the white-out and redolent with the smell of exhaust.
They pushed their way through the crowds to where the Titans were, massive, fat-bellied transports, the largest intra-atmospheric vehicle in service with the Fleet. They sat like monoliths in the white haze, projecting huge beams of light around them like rows of hypersled arenas at dusk, winking with red warning lights. Twenty storeys up, Scarcroft could see men moving around in their yellow-lit observation decks, while at ground level, their vast hangars were open, enveloping the huge tracked transporters like a whale ingesting krill.
Here, the going was easier thanks to the furnace-hot downwash of the Titan’s attitudinal thrusters which melted the snow and ice as quickly as it could form, and they strode through the ranks of cyclopean vehicles with a marked improvement in speed until they reached the massive queues of provar waiting beyond. Here, the aliens crushed up against metal gates and hastily erected barriers, overseen by twitchy Mantix-clad marines from prefab guard towers, hundreds of thousands of them packed together like penguins huddling in the Antarctic. A Manticore soared overhead with its hold door open, a watchful sniper leaning out, scanning the crowd.
‘Where is he?’ Scarcroft asked Goyai.
‘He is there, Fleet Marshal,’ the kaygryn said, pointing to a provar bedecked in robes and symbols of office. He was the only provar on the UN side of the gate.
‘Check him with the dogs,’ Scarcroft muttered to Roque, and the captain bade the canine units to give the overseer a thorough sniff.
‘Clear,’ one of the handlers said, giving a thumbs-up through the haze.
Scarcroft sighed as he walked towards the provar, pulling the scarf away from his mouth. ‘Translate,’ he said to the kaygryn.
‘Yes, Fleet Marshal.’
Scarcroft pulled up short in front of the overseer, a relatively gangly and diminutive alien when compared to its martial countrymen. Despite the raging wind-driven sleet, meng’Dama seemed perfectly comfortable in its soaked-through robes.
‘I am Fleet Marshal Scarcroft. I am in command of this operation. We are not having a blessing,’ he snapped. Goyai duly translated. ‘We don’t have time. We’re loading up in ten minutes. Understand?’
When Goyai finished talking, meng’Dama started.
‘He says the blessing is important,’ Goyai said. ‘All provari land is sacred. You despoil it by being here. It will need to be re-consecrated as they leave.’
Scarcroft rolled his eyes. ‘Tell him that he can do whatever the hell he wants, but if it holds up my evacuation by one second, I’ll park a bullet in his head.’ He jabbed Goyai in the chest before he could speak. ‘And don’t sugar coat it.’
‘Y-yes, Fleet Marshal,’ the kaygryn stammered.
‘Come on,’ Scarcroft said to Roque. The light was fading fast. ‘We’re wasting time.’
*
‘I—oh. Sorry to disturb you, sir.’
‘Sloper. You’re not disturbing me. Come in,’ the Vulture said.
‘I can come back another time?’
‘For God’s sake man, I’ve just told you you’re not disturbing me,’ the Vulture snapped. He turned back to the inert form of his daughter, Tanja, ensconced in the storage capsule filled with orange nanogel matrix. A high-definition holo gave the impression that the front of the capsule was transparent.
‘Doesn’t she look peaceful?’ the Vulture said softly, tracing his gloved fingers over the capsule door. ‘Like a sleeping child. Innocent. No troubles, no concerns. She’ll never know the wars and struggles of this galaxy.’
Sloper cleared his throat. The Vulture sighed, and turned away from the capsule. His second in command was floating just inside the door, one hand gripping one of the ceiling-mounted grab hoops. His eyes were fixed on the floor.
‘What’s the matter, Sloper?’ the Vulture asked. A baffled if slightly malicious smile creased his features. ‘It’s just a female body.’
Sloper cleared his throat again. ‘She’s, uh, she’s naked, sir.’
The Vulture snorted. ‘So? You’ve seen naked women before, Sloper. What’s different about this one?’
‘It’s your daughter, sir. It would be… disrespectful to look.’
‘Why? I didn’t undress her.’
It was true. When he’d finally found her, three weeks into the Ascendancy War, she’d been halfway through fucking some UNDM miscreant in the diplomatic quarters of Bospen’s Enauk City. The diplomat, one of those vile Exigency Corps pretty boys, had earned a bullet in the head for trying to talk his way out of it, and she’d earned the humiliation of being dragged screaming out of his apartment, naked, and into the hold of the waiting Stormshadow. There she remained, deeply comatose, denied even a basic VR simulation. When he’d assessed the threat from the Kaygryn Empire, he would consider releasing her. Until then, it simply wasn’t safe, and as her father, he had a duty to protect her whether she liked it or not.
‘Still, sir,’ Sloper said, and the Vulture had to admire the man. He’d seen Sloper tie up provari civilians and peel their skin off while they were still alive, but show the man a naked woman and he blushed like a schoolgirl.
‘You’re an enigma to me, Sloper,’ the Vulture said, cancelling the holo. The small, cramped store room returned to its dull red glow. ‘What did you want to talk to me about?’
‘The President has asked for you, sir. Personally.’
‘Has she now?’ The Vulture asked, raising one of his eyebrows. Idly, he massaged a temple. In about an hour’s time, he was going to be savaged by a powerful migraine, though they had become so frequent and predictable now that the agony was near constant. But then he had given himself a brain tumour.
‘Yes, sir,’ Sloper said. ‘I’ve just received a message from her.’
‘From her?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘As in, Andrea Constance wrote the message herself and sent it?’
‘Uh… As far as I can tell, sir.’
The Vulture rubbed his chin. Was she reining them in at long last, now that the war was over? Were they to be arrested and executed for unforgivable war crimes?
He snorted. Given their current civilisational predicament, it was hardly likely.
‘Well, I suppose we’d better go and see what she wants, hadn’t we?’
The Pantragruel arrived over Vargonroth seven hours later to find orbit crammed full of Fleet ships and minefields and total LRIS saturation. Given the heightened security, it took them ten minutes to receive their Whiteport clearance vector. The Vulture took the space plane down by himself while his men waited in the Pantragruel.
He ordered the blast shutters back with a few kilometres to go. Arrengate remained perennially grey—grey banks of snow clouds, grey buildings, grey landscape—though the city itself was buzzing with lights and traffic. It was only then, as the plane swooped towards the huge orbital pylons of Whiteport, that he realised he hadn’t set foot in a UN city for over half a year.
The Stormshadow landed on a platform near the eastern end of the spaceport, and he shed his Mantix and donned his civilian clothes for the first time in recent memory: a shabby pair of boots, jeans, a UNAF-branded grey sweatshirt with the insignia of his pre-SPECWAR regiment on it, and a battered black jacket. Then he stood in silent contemplation for a second, before he shed the jacket, pulled a shoulder holster on, jammed a rail pistol in to it, and pulled the jacket back on.
Outside it was bitterly cold. He could have summoned a military transport easily enough, but instead he walked through the smoggy spaceport, walked through the south terminal, and called an autonomous cab via his IHD.
‘Carrington Manor,’ he said as he ducked inside.
‘Restricted address,’ the cab replied insolently.
The Vulture sighed and IHD-beamed his credentials into the cab’s processor.
‘Thank you, Commander,’ the cab said, and it pulled away from the kerb with a melodic hum of its engines.
The drive reminded him why he rarely visited UN cities. He’d long abandoned any notion of fighting on behalf of the average UN citizen, given that the average UN citizen was an information junkie obsessed with sex and violence, subsisting on their entitlement deed and abandoning formal education at the age of twelve to live a life of lazy hedonism. The Vulture followed his own philosophies, and worshipped the power of death to the point at which he no longer considered himself traditionally human, but before then, he’d been misanthropic enough to cultivate a strong hatred of humanity too.
The cab clattered on to one of the city’s elevated municipal trackways and accelerated to two hundred kilometres per hour. The Vulture let his head rest against the seat behind him, and only realised he had dozed off when the cab pulled to a stop in front of Carrington Manor. It was as if the collective stupidity of all the UN citizens around him had somehow distilled into a communicable disease, and he’d contracted their lethargy in the fifteen minutes he’d been on-world. The thought made him shudder.
He exited the cab in the dull afternoon light and approached the gates. A Mantix-clad guard stopped him and relieved him, to his unfathomable irritation, of his sidearm, and the Vulture thought, these people are no better than the basest of insects. What gall they have to address me. They have no idea of what I have done, how many lives I have taken, of the power at my fingertips.
He walked through the ostentatiously decorated halls and corridors of Carrington, taking in the old busts and portraits with a sneer of distaste. An IHD marker pulsed in his vision, enticing him to a room at the back of the estate, and for one brief, absurd moment, he imagined her waiting for him, naked like his daughter, ready to entice him into some kind of vulgar sexual enterprise. He had to stop himself from physically shuddering at the thought. The Vulture’s sexuality had died with the last scraps of his empathy some years before. The only thing that seemed to excite him in such a way was violent death, but daily ruminations on the subject kept any such ardour to a minimum.
The marker eventually drew him to a well-appointed drawing room overlooking the East Sea at the back of the mansion. Inside, reposed in a large, wing-backed leather armchair, was the President. She was, mercifully, clothed.
‘Vladimir,’ she said with an affected nonchalance. For all her power—and considerable strength of character—she was still frightened of him. Frightened and repulsed in equal measure. Why else take his weapon, or scan him on entry?
‘Andrea,’ he said, his nonchalance real.
Constance eyed him from the chair. She was wearing a fitted dark-blue shift dress and a string of pearls. Her legs bore the telltale sheen of hose in the wan light generated by a crackling log fire to his right. Her shoes, heels, lay in an untidy pile a metre away.
He took her in, her face and her body, studying her in the way a curious child might relish in the study of roadkill. She had the large breasts and hips of a healthy middle-aged woman, a full head of thick, dark hair, and the agreeable glow of someone who had access to the very best of regen pods. Yet there was something else, too, something behind the façade. She was exhausted, stressed, frayed like an overtight hawser. The Ascendancy War had hardened her, turned her soul to cold iron. She was a leader who had come to realise the value of men like him, who had learned that playing fair didn’t work—and learned the hard way. Her principles had been eroded by months of brutal warfare until she had become devoid of empathy, a pragmatic husk who saw lives as numbers on a holo and entire civilisations as pieces on a chessboard. In those brief moments of silence, the Vulture’s respect of Constance—which had been high in the first place—increased immeasurably.
‘How are you?’ she asked him. ‘Can I get you a drink?’
The Vulture smiled. He was going to enjoy this. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Water, please.’
A machine to his right produced a glass of water. It tinkled with ice as he recovered it. He took a long draw and licked his lips when he was done.
‘My second in command tells me that you asked me here personally,’ he remarked. Constance shifted slightly uncomfortably in her seat.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I did.’
The Vulture took another sip of water, then set it down on a coaster. He took a seat opposite her and clasped his hands. ‘Well, here I am.’
She looked at him, studied him. At the beginning of the year, there would have been contempt there, barely concealed behind a façade of insufferable politeness. Now there was just… curiosity. They both fascinated one another.
‘I did ask you here,’ she said, ‘because I want you to do something for me.’
The Vulture suppressed a smirk. Of course she wanted him to do something. The rules had changed. No-one was pretending any more. ‘And what would you like me to do?’
Constance sighed. She looked around the room. The Vulture offered nothing; whatever it was, she was going to have to say it unprompted. ‘You know about the Kaygryn Empire.’
‘Naturally.’
‘You know about the kaygryn here, the Kaygryn Federacy—or whatever it is they go by these days.’
‘Of course.’ He knew where it was going. He’d known before he’d even come.
Constance ran a hand through her hair. She looked at the small log fire. ‘Oh, Vladimir, you are a loathsome man,’ she said after a while. The Vulture, who had long grown used to insults, was actually surprised for once, both by the rudeness and suddenness of it.
‘I haven’t said anything,’ he said reasonably.
‘No, but what have you done? What have you been doing for the past six months? What were you doing in the Ascendancy?’
‘I rather suspect you know the answer to all of those questions, Andrea, or I wouldn’t be here,’ the Vulture replied.
Constance stood up, walked over to the drinks machine, and ordered a tumbler of something clear and undoubtedly alcoholic. She drained it, ordered another, and then walked back over to the chair. The Vulture didn’t move. ‘The kaygryn are going mad,’ she said, ‘all across the bloody galaxy. I get reports every day of bombs going off, of UN citizens being killed. This Kaygryn Empire nonsense has stirred them up and they’re all going berserk. I don’t have the UNAF manpower—and frankly the bloody inclination—to police every kaygryn border we have while I have to prepare the UN for total war.’ She fixed him in the eye. ‘I don’t have time for it, Vladimir.’
‘Tell me why I’m here, listening to you, Andrea. I know what you want me to do, but I’m not leaving until I’ve heard you say it.’
‘Oh, you are a real creature, aren’t you?’ she sneered. ‘You know what needs to be done.’
The Vulture nodded. ‘Of course. I’ve always known. You’ve always known. You used to be embarrassed and disdainful of men like me. Of SPECWAR. Now you realise how vital we are. Every general and fleet marshal and president reaches the same conclusion in the end. I’d be lying if I said I did not derive some satisfaction from witnessing it.’
Tendrils of pain were creeping through the base of his skull, like jungle vines wrapping around a tree trunk. They are so frequent now, he thought idly. I must be weeks from death.
Constance made a disgusted noise. ‘I can’t believe I asked you here. This was a mistake.’
‘No, it wasn’t,’ the Vulture said. ‘It was fate. Fate brought us to this juncture. You know the path that needs to be taken. It’s there as plain as day. Just say the words. Issue the order. Then I’ll know you’ve become the leader we need.’ He had to stop himself getting excited. To watch the President betray her conscience, her principles, her very morals, was as exhilarating as murdering an entire planet of provar. The only thing that would make it better was if she were crying, but he knew she was too strong for that.
‘We are talking about billions of lives,’ Constance said quietly.
The Vulture shrugged. ‘Billions of lives who will be all too happy to join the Kaygryn Empire when they arrive and kill your people to a man.’
‘You are not a god, Vladimir. You have no right to do this. No power. I should be having you executed.’
I am a fucking god. I am the Reaper himself, you gutless cunt. I have the power of Hades behind me. ‘I will do as I am ordered,’ he said levelly. ‘Andrea, I am not going to pre-empt you. Stop being a coward and say the words.’
Her hand squeezed the tumbler until it shattered. Bright crimson blood welled up from several deep lacerations to her palm and dribbled on the floor. ‘Get out!’ she roared at the Mantix-clad guard responding to her Bodily Integrity Alarm. The man disappeared out the door so quickly it was like watching a comedy.
The Vulture sat, unmoving but inwardly triumphant, as the blood dribbled down Constance’s wrist and forearm. It clotted quickly, thanks to her advanced blood, and she wiped the excess on her dress irritably. The shards of broken glass glittered in the firelight.
The omens were as good as they could possibly have been.
‘I want you,’ Constance said, looking at him, ‘to take your band of merry fucking men, and I want you to make this kaygryn problem stop. Do whatever you have to do. There is no legality as far as I am concerned. Just make them stop. Kill every last one of them if you have to.’ She let out an angry sigh that turned into a roar. ‘Have I made myself clear enough? Is that what you wanted to hear, you fucking psychopath?’
The Vulture smiled. ‘Yes, Ma’am President. You’ve made yourself crystal clear. As your humble servant, I am all too happy to oblige.’
‘You’re not my fucking servant,’ she said. ‘You’re not even SPECWAR any more. I am going to put a kill order out on you, do you understand? You are persona non grata.’
The Vulture laughed. ‘Even better!’ he said. ‘I expected to be arrested, and here I am being put on retainer! Anything else?’
‘No, get out. This is the last time we will speak, understand?’
‘I understand you perfectly,’ the Vulture said, unable to hide the savage glee from his face, ‘just as you understand me, Andrea.’ He stood and finished the last of his water, before setting the glass down very carefully on its coaster. ‘But there is one thing you are wrong about.’ He walked purposefully towards the door. ‘We will see one another again. Before this war is over.’
He winked at the guard outside the door as Constance’s frustrated scream was silenced by the audio dampers.