‘Don’t stand there and tell me we don’t sanction extrajudicial killings. Special Warfare Division is a glorified hit squad.’
Alvar Menes, Federal Socialist Minister for Home Affairs, speaking at a Joint Intelligence Command select committee hearing
Vondur watched, wide-eyed, as the massive ships lowered themselves to the surface of Cobalta. Gigantic fusion engines cooked the earth below and anything that stood on it—buildings, kaygryn, humans—and vast, crab-like proboscises anchored them into the bedrock. A gale of debris stormed through the streets from the downwash before the ground below was liquidated to molten rock and the ships settled into the magma stew, sealing them in place like wax signets. Whatever they were, whatever their purpose, they were here to stay.
He pulled his Goliath all over the place, straining to avoid the intensifying rail fire. Surface-to-air missiles, too, exploded around him as the kaygryn below tried their hand with man-portable ordnance. Sandwiched between two layers of seething munitions, it wouldn’t be long before he ran out of either shields or luck.
‘Cox, get close to one of these bloody things!’ he shouted over the comlink, highlighting the arks with an IHD beacon. ‘It’s the only protection!’
‘Aye, sir,’ Cox replied, his voice clipped and strained by G.
Vondur pulled the Goliath around in a hard, tight turn and burned on full reheat for the nearest Imperial ark ship. Most of the massive vessels had landed on the outskirts of Cobalta, but a few had landed plum in the middle of the city. One was less than a kilometre away, the ground still glowing an incandescent yellow beneath it, and he latched on to it like a tick on a dog. Immediately, both the orbital and surface-based artillery died away.
He took stock for a few precious seconds. He was a few hundred metres off the ground, but the ship was much taller than that. It towered above and below him, tan-coloured, ribbed with pulsing turquoise lights. On the ground, thousands of kaygryn, no longer being massacred by his and Cox’s Goliaths, were free to resume their assault.
Vondur felt the Goliath’s gauntlets grip the composite hull of the lander in helpless frustration as hundreds of humans below were dragged from their homes and beaten to death. He would only make matters worse trying to interdict; if he flew down to help them in his giant bullet magnet, errant rail strikes would obliterate the UN citizens much more ruthlessly and efficiently than the kaygryn flooding in from Ok’Vura.
The channel to Colonel Drago from the 114th Cobalta Infantry Regiment was dead. He turned his enhanced optics—enhanced in name only—towards UNAF Cobalta, but the vast pillars of smoke emanating from within its scarred walls told only of bad news. The air, too, was conspicuously free of Manticores and other APCs and aircraft which lacked the speed and manoeuvrability of his own AMMRCV. A few palls of smoke like exploded flak hung in the warm evening air.
‘What do you think?’ he asked Cox. The comlink was straining against the electronic warfare saturation permeating the wideband.
‘I think we’re approaching a conclusion,’ Cox said wearily.
Vondur nodded absent-mindedly inside his pilot’s capsule. ‘Christ,’ he said eventually. More explosions and chaos ripped through Cobalta City. They would soon find themselves behind the kaygryn invasion, rather than at the vanguard.
A few desultory shots raked the ark lander around him from the ground. The kaygryn could see him, but there wasn’t a bloody thing anyone was willing to do about it.
‘Where did you end up?’ Vondur asked Cox.
‘One klick north of you,’ Cox replied. ‘I can see you.’
Vondur turned his optics north and searched for Cox among the clutter of electronic beacons lighting up his HUD. The sergeant was there, latched on to the side of another lander, higher up but plainly visible. He, like Vondur, was the only feature on the otherwise smooth hull of the ark. The distant Goliath raised an RRG’d gauntlet in salute.
Vondur licked his lips. His pulse rose a few BPMs. There was only one thing they could do, one course of action open to them. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘I think we’re going to have to ditch the Goliaths and proceed on foot. The second we detach, we’re just game for orbit.’
‘Yeah,’ Cox grunted resignedly. ‘That’s the conclusion I reached too.’
‘I can’t raise ZEN at all. All comms to base seem to be down. Are you having any luck?’
‘No,’ Cox replied, ‘already tried. Bloody ZEN would be damn useful right about now.’
There was a pause. Vondur watched the chaos below, trying to work out a way he could exit the comfortable, force-shielded and diamond-armoured Goliath without being immediately killed. A few seconds later, he saw his opening: a group of UN men and women armed with pilfered railguns and a variety of melee weapons. Where they had taken the guns from, he didn’t know—but it didn’t matter. They were an armed mob, they were fighting back, and Vondur could make a material difference to their chances of success.
‘I’m bugging out,’ he said before he could talk himself out of it. ‘Head for my position and I’ll head for yours.’
‘Roger,’ Cox replied.
There was a second’s pause while a number of sentiments passed, unspoken, between them.
‘Good luck, Chester,’ Vondur said eventually.
‘Aye, and you, Ben,’ Cox replied.
Vondur forced back a crushing wave of desperation with a long stim release. Whatever it was that had taken root in his mind, whatever trauma lay inside, was slowly winning out. He felt as though his sanity was hanging by a few weak threads. He just had to keep it at bay a little longer. Cox was right; whatever was happening on Cobalta, in the Milky Way, it was rapidly reaching a head.
He released his grip on the side of the ark, leaving two ragged holes in its hull, and slid down the side of the ship. A quick burst of thrust from his plasmastats took the sting out of the landing, and before he could think about it too much, he punched the quick release. The Goliath’s chest thumped outwards, explosively decoupled, the capsule hissed open, and he snatched the emergency rail carbine from its slot.
Screaming chaos greeted him. The air above was thick with red-lit smoke, and the smell of ionised air, of ozone and chemical explosives—cordite, among others—filled his nose. The air was a chattering cacophony of gunfire and the buzz of phase. When there was a pause in the canvas of popping small arms, then human and alien screams and battle cries were quick to take up the slack.
The kaygryn had given his Goliath a wide berth, fearing it to be active, and that gave him a few precious, unthinking seconds to raise the carbine and put three of them down before he scurried for cover in a southbound alleyway, chased by gunfire that scoured the asphalt around his boots.
‘Hey! The… Over there!’ A woman’s voice, her mouth jammed up with words from the combat high. ‘That machine… the soldier!’
Vondur couldn’t see who it was, but it must have been the impromptu militia he’d resolved to help. There was a loud exchange of gunfire—Vondur had forgotten just how ear-splitting it could be without the benefit of a metre of nanogel surrounding him—and a brief, tense interlude, before the thumping of footsteps turned into a disorganised mass of civilians standing in front of him. There were ten of them, only half of whom were armed. Some were visibly wounded. All of their pupils were stretched wide open by stims.
‘I’m Captain Ben Vondur,’ he said, standing. His flight suit, while bearing the rudiments of Mantix, lacked even a helmet speaker, and he had to remove the thing to be heard over the backdrop of world-ending violence. ‘I’m Captain Ben Vondur, 225 Squadron Goliaths,’ he said, feeling the warm, fire-driven breeze lick the perspiration from his face.
‘I’m Grol,’ the leader-apparent said, a burly man in a disagreeable Cobaltan accent. ‘Ex-UNAF. Cobalta Rifles,’ he added proudly. ‘What’s going on? What the fuck is that thing?’
Vondur didn’t need to follow the man’s finger. The ark was barely thirty metres away, looming over them like an enormous corporate HQ.
‘Some kind of Imperial kaygryn lander,’ Vondur said. ‘I honestly have no idea what it does.’
‘Where is the Fleet?’ a woman asked from behind Grol’s shoulder.
‘Destroyed,’ Vondur replied simply.
Consternation rippled through the impromptu militia.
‘There’s nothing?’ Grol demanded.
‘There’s nothing,’ Vondur echoed tiredly.
‘What the fuck do we do, then?’ a third person asked.
Vondur stopped himself shrugging. Too cavalier. These people were having their lives, their homes, their friends, their neighbours and families literally torn apart. Heavy stim usage must have been the only thing keeping them from breaking down. Vondur knew that that was certainly the case with him.
‘We last as long as we can,’ he said, trying to force some fire through his veins. ‘Most of the kaygryn you see are just from Ok’Vura, civilians, irregulars. They’ll die just as easily as anyone else. The Imperials have four arms and force shields. If we come across one of them, game over.’ Evidently, no-one needed a briefing on what he meant by ‘Imperials’.
‘And then? They killed my girls! My two girls!’ one of the men snapped, though with the odd, clinical detachment that only Fight and Flight could produce.
‘I don’t know,’ Vondur said, guilt coursing through him. ‘I don’t—’
He stopped. His comlink crackled, then it squawked, then it whined and whistled. Then a message, clearly on loop, began playing—and judging from the fact that its author was dead, it had been playing for some time: ‘This is Colonel Soto broadcasting on all UNAF and civilian ECA channels. The Imperial kaygryn leading the attack on Cobalta is Executor Ghesovius Hasani. He is a priority target. There is a standing kill order on him. If you have any opportunity to terminate him, take it. This is Colonel Soto broadcasting on all UNAF and civilian ECA channels. The—’
‘What?’
Vondur looked up. The comlink fuzzed for a few seconds, then died. His IHD confirmed the authenticity of the broadcast.
‘What?’ The same voice again.
‘Hasani,’ he said. The word hurt like a slap across the face. The author of his greatest misery. The one alien in the galaxy he would gladly kill above all others. He was here. Here on Cobalta. Vondur’s vision swam in and out of focus for a few seconds as the news sank vertiginously into his already strained mind.
‘What’s a Hasani?’ the gruff leader asked. The militia was growing restless. They were only one street removed from the tail end of a massacre. Combat-grade stims were making their trigger fingers itchy.
‘Executor Hasani is the leader of the Imperials,’ Vondur said distantly. ‘There is a kill order on him.’
Something exploded in the street next to them, making them all flinch. Above, some sort of foghorn blared from the ark lander, triggering Vondur’s UNAF-implant audio dampers but incapacitating the militia for the duration of it.
‘What do we do?!’ the women behind Grol yelled when the infernal noise had stopped.
‘I’m going to find him and kill him,’ Vondur said through gritted teeth. ‘Join me or don’t.’
But Grol couldn’t pretend to assert himself, ex-Rifles or not, over the authority of a serving member of UNAF. ‘We’ll come with you,’ he said.
Vondur nodded once and hefted the butt of his carbine into his shoulder. ‘All right, come on.’
They moved back the way they had come, Vondur at the head, Grol behind him. The woman with Grol was evidently his partner, judging by the way they interacted, and was comfortable holding a railgun. Vondur put two more with railguns at the back. Those in the middle were armed with melee weapons and would only be useful in diverting bullets away from those with guns.
Vondur peered round the corner and took stock of the street. His HUD detected nothing, though with the current levels of electronic warfare saturation, that didn’t mean much. He snatched his head back. ‘All right, stay focussed,’ he said. ‘It looks like they’ve moved west, but I can’t be sure without enhanced optics.’
Grol nodded and signalled to the rest of them.
Vondur moved into the street. It was wide, as most were in UN purpose-built colonies, but walled in on both sides by huge grey buildings. Most of the public advertising holos had died, and municipal transports—those that remained intact—were stationary on their maglev rails. The street was a field of corpses, smashed cruisers, chunks of rubble and craters. Fires, unhindered by dousing systems thanks to the loss of power, raged out of control, eating through modern building materials and emitting clouds of toxic black smoke.
They moved westwards, following the fading sounds of violence, trying to ignore the hundreds of smashed and bloodied corpses of humans lining the streets. Many lay as ragdolls, their faces purple and swollen, their clothes ripped off; others lay in heart-breaking poses where they had tried to protect loved ones. For every twenty humans, one unlucky kaygryn lay in the mix. A few bore the hallmarks of having been hit by Vondur’s own RRG—which was to say, there wasn’t much left of them at all.
‘Goddamn kags,’ Grol was muttering angrily over and over. Vondur remained silent. Hasani was all that mattered.
If only I had any idea where to find him.
‘Captain?’ crackled the comlink. Vondur’s head instinctively turned. It seemed like a slow, weak movement without the Goliath interface.
‘Cox,’ Vondur said, searching his IHD for a marker. ‘I can’t see you.’
‘I have a reading on you. You’re still a klick south of me,’ the staff sergeant said, his voice barely above a whisper. He paused. ‘Sir, there’s something going on over here.’
‘What?’
‘The Imperial lander, sir. It’s… it made a bloody loud noise. Now it looks like it’s opening.’
Vondur spun around, giving Grol a start. Sure enough, the nearest ark lander to them was opening too. Around the giant crab claws of the landing proboscises, huge hangar doors were yawning free of the superstructure.
‘Oh shit,’ he breathed. Imperial soldiers appeared at the top of the newly extended debarkation ramps. There was a collective intake of breath from the militia as slowly, inexorably, ranks of kaygryn, halberds and armour gleaming, began marching down to the ruined earth of Cobalta.
Vondur keyed in the wideband. ‘This is Captain Ben Vondur in the blind, UNAF 225 Squadron Goliaths, I have eyes on Imperial, that’s indigo ground troops on Cobalta… Thousands of them,’ he added, briefly awed by the unfolding scene. ‘Damn it, they’re in the landers!’ His breath rasped excitedly in his throat. He could think of nothing else to add, and so looped the transmission and kept it broadcasting.
‘Captain!’ Grol’s partner shouted. He looked at her. ‘What do we do?’
Vondur scowled. ‘Find Hasani,’ he said, repeating his new mantra, but then the air was filled with the rattling of gunfire and the keening of assault lasers, and suddenly finding Hasani seemed like the last thing they were about to do.
‘Get to cover!’ Vondur yelled as hard rounds spanged off the wall above and around them. One of the mob’s gunners went down, a fist-sized exit wound through his abdomen. Ahead, a few hundred metres away, a group of kaygryn were moving back east. A few were clutching old rifles that UNIS agents would have laughed at from orbit a few months ago.
‘There, in there!’ Vondur shouted, gesturing for the group to move down a road that ran perpendicular to the one they were on. Grol lingered, took a knee, and calmly fired. One of the kaygryn’s shins exploded, and it went down hard. Vondur lay down a covering burst—accidentally braining the kaygryn Grol had just wounded—and then slapped the Cobaltan on the shoulder. ‘Come on!’ he shouted.
Under a hail of fire, they followed the group on to the next street. Vondur’s hands were slick with sweat inside his pressure suit. He gripped the carbine tightly and scanned the area for any sign of kaygryn, but they turned up nothing except corpses and shattered, crumbling, burning buildings.
‘We lost Goldwater,’ someone was crying, evidently for the man who’d just had his stomach filleted by hard tungsten rounds.
‘Cox, where are you?’ Vondur asked, motioning for Grol to watch their rear. The man nodded irritably.
‘—o minutes away,’ Cox replied over the failing comlink. ‘That’s zero-two minutes. I’ve got a clear run south. Might have eyes on Hasani.’
Vondur’s heart threatened to explode at the mention of his name. ‘Where? When?!’ he transmitted, but the line had failed again. ‘Fuck!’ he snapped, and he slapped the nearest fighter on the back. ‘Let’s push north!’ he shouted angrily. ‘Make for the gap between those two buildings, past the theatre. Move!’
The man nodded dumbly and led the group away at a clumsy sprint. Vondur turned and brought the carbine up. The kaygryn who had killed Goldwater would be following them, and sure enough, in a brief and fortuitous electronics reprieve, three aliens showed up on his warm body scanner, approaching the street lackadaisically from the south-west. They must have been what in UNAF parlance were known as HAGs, Have-A-Gos, civilians like the ones Vondur was leading.
‘Three coming, end of this alley,’ he said. Three and then tens of thousands more from the east, he thought. Every second they lingered for an easy win was a second’s march closer for the Imperials streaming out of the arks.
The kaygryn appeared in the middle of the alley at the end, confirming Vondur’s opinion of them by not even taking cover. Grol and Vondur killed two straight away; the third made it a few metres back down the alley before a second burst from Gol blasted the back of its furry head open and threw a fistful of brain into the hot Cobaltan air. Vondur was loath to admit it, but the man was a considerably better shot than he was.
The sky was darkening now, a combination of evening twilight and thick palls of smoke. In the distance, another Fleet ship, no more than a black speck, tumbled to the surface. Vondur watched it in a daze. Any last vestige of UN control over the situation was gone.
‘Sir!’
Vondur span around. Cox was at the northern end of the street, alone. His pressure suit was smoking in a few places, and phase burn marked his right boot.
‘Cox!’ Vondur shouted. ‘Grol, come on,’ he said, and ran to the northern end of the street. He grabbed Cox into a quick embrace.
‘The other pilot we saw,’ Grol remarked as he closed the distance. He held out his hand. ‘Grol Hogan, formerly of the Cobalta Rifles.’
‘Good man,’ Cox growled, taking the man’s hand. ‘Staff Sergeant Chester Cox.’
‘What did you see?’ Vondur asked, desperate. ‘Did you see Hasani on the way here?’
‘Can’t tell ’em apart, but it might have been,’ Cox said. ‘One chap was wearing a cloak. Looked important. Matched the description you gave me.’
Vondur’s mind swam. By anyone’s standards it was lousy intelligence, but they were living on borrowed time. If every ark was disgorging thousands of Imperial troops, then they had minutes before they were surrounded. Ever since Hasani had left Vondur to die alone on Sophia, that cold, alien superiority written across its well-groomed features, Vondur had dreamed about killing him, dreamed what it would feel like to have revenge, to wrap his fingers around its thick tree-trunk neck and strangle the life out of him. It was enough to go on—for him.
‘I have to kill Hasani,’ Vondur said, suddenly on the verge of tears. He dumped more stims into his system until he was close to overdosing, and bit back the emotion until the feeling subsided. ‘I have to. If it’s the last damn thing I do.’
Cox nodded. He too had foregone his helmet, and his old features, drawn from years of combat and high-G vectoring, creased in understanding. ‘I know you do, lad. I’ll help in any way I can.’
Vondur turned to Grol.
‘I’ll help too,’ Grol offered, but Vondur shook his head.
‘You need to help your friends. You’re the only one with experience and they’ll last longer with you leading them. Hell, you’re better than me with that thing.’ He nodded at the railgun.
Grol shrugged nonchalantly, but he had been stung by the refusal. ‘Suit yourself,’ he said and slapped Vondur on the shoulder. ‘Good luck. If you find the kag you’re looking for, give him one for me,’ he said. Then he turned and headed north-east.
‘Come on,’ Vondur said to Cox. ‘We don’t have much time.’
In fact, they didn’t have any time. Cox’s expression suddenly contorted in shock, and Vondur knew that, behind him, the Imperials had arrived.
‘Go!’ was all he managed to shout. He didn’t want to turn back, to look and see the four-armed kaygryn with quad-powered laser halberds and charged blades and personal force shields marching towards them, but he did, and there they were, moving with an odd nonchalance that was total anathema to UNAF combat doctrine. There must have been two dozen approaching from the south, their armour light grey and trimmed with sky-blue markings, their faces impassive behind ballistic masks. They each held their halberds in their two right hands. They made no attempt to fire.
‘Run!’ Cox shouted, and they did, heading north. A tower to their left collapsed in the firestorm, shattering to the floor with an enormous clatter like the blackened skeleton of a giant. Overhead, the first Imperial aircraft began to appear, chunky insectoid craft that looked no better or more sophisticated than Manticores, draped with electronic warfare pods and ordnance pylons. They burbled with data chatter like ZENs as they passed, and Vondur once again tried to hail his own ZEN. The comlink remained defiantly silent.
They pressed on through Cobalta as it died, curiously unmolested. Any remaining civilians had either fled or been killed. Ok’Vuran kaygryn had swept west into the city. UNAF forces had been neutralised. The Fleet was gone. For an eerie minute, it seemed to Vondur that he and Cox were the last humans left in the city, alone with the gigantic ark landers.
‘Where next?’ Vondur snapped at Cox. Whatever he had felt about killing the kaygryn this morning, whatever remorse he had, whatever the sadness, the anguish, the psychotic distress, that had been relegated to the back of his mind, there to burn like an underground fire. They had rampaged through Cobalta and deliberately, brutally killed every human they could lay their hands on. They did not deserve his remorse. Iyadi, murdered by EFFECT agents, no longer deserved his guilt. It was anger, now, rage, white hot, that burned his heart like phase had burned the city. His sanity had been ripped apart like wet tissue paper by Hasani. The feeling of betrayal when Hasani had abandoned him to die, the feeling of helplessness as he had wept alone on Sophia for six months, the feeling of isolation, of being cut off from the net—that ran soul-deep. He fixated on it. Hasani was the key to his salvation. Closure. The death of this one alien would absolve him of a lifetime of guilt—ten lifetimes. He was so tired, tired of everything. Just one more death and it could all be over. Just one more…
By the time they rounded the corner on to North 5 Traverse, Vondur was practically incoherent. Cox had to physically drag him into what had once been a café to stop the captain running at a mass of Imperials moving methodically down the road. They had been seen by at least thirty kaygryn. Not a single shot had been fired.
‘Captain!’ Cox yelled, and slapped him smartly across the face. Vondur stopped babbling. They had taken cover—insofar as anywhere was cover—on the first floor. Vondur could feel the heat of a nearby fire through the floor and walls. The air was saturated with it. Perspiration ran in rivulets down his face.
‘They saw us and they didn’t fire,’ Cox said.
Vondur stared at him. He tried with all his power to hold himself together, for the sake of his colleague and friend. Despite Herculean efforts, he could feel his mind unhinging.
Hasani.
‘Hasani,’ he said, licking his lips feverishly. ‘I have to—’
‘They’ve seen us, lad,’ Cox said with infinite patience. ‘They’ve seen us and they’re not firing. I don’t know what’s going on, but now seems like a good time to jack it in. Game over, as you would say.’
Vondur felt his grasp on the situation slipping.
‘They killed August,’ he said.
‘No, the provar killed August,’ Cox said soothingly. ‘And Jarvin.’
‘And Elyan, and Syoba. And Vandemarr.’
Cox nodded sadly. ‘Aye,’ he said.
Vondur could hear the Imperials downstairs now, hear their boots crunching the shattered window glass. They talked to one another casually in Argish.
‘I can’t, Chester,’ he said. He thought of Iyadi again, and then of the Valleron pilot he had killed with his Goliath gauntlet. ‘I can’t… I’m losing it. The med techs were right. Kowalski was right.’
Cox nodded despite not having the first clue who Kowalski was. His features wore the pained expression of someone watching their parent succumb to dementia. ‘You need the psych techs to give you a good working over. Nothing they can’t cure these days. Just hang in there, lad. You’ve been through so much. Time to give up the ghost. Rest.’
He whispered the last word. Vondur closed his eyes. When he opened them again, a minute or so must have passed, for the Imperials were there, their halberds humming softly with the charged blades. Neither made any kind of threatening move, though Cox still placed his and Vondur’s carbines on the deck and raised his hands.
The kaygryn seemed to ignore them for a moment. Then one activated a wrist-mounted holo and held his arm out. Cox watched the screen.
‘You are now prisoners. It is not our desire that every human is killed. Our quarrel is with the provar. You must not fight any more. Submit to the Reclamation and your lives will be spared. If you do not fight, you will be treated well. You are now prisoners. It is not our desire—’
The foremost kaygryn cancelled the holo.
‘It’s over, lad,’ Cox said, wrapping his arm around Vondur’s shoulders. ‘Come on. It’s over. Let’s go.’
But Vondur just looked at him blankly.
*
Five kilometres to the north, on the firing shelf of UNAF Cobalta’s southern perimeter wall, ZEN calmly loaded a magazine of long-range API-85 incendiary airburst rounds into its LR701 long-barrelled railgun. Either side of it, Mantix-clad corpses of UNAF soldiers lay three deep, twisted and mangled by all manner of ordnance and charged blades. Behind it, the base, little more than a series of craters and burning piles of rubble, smoked like factory towers in the warm evening breeze.
The fighting had largely died away. The Imperials and Ok’Vuran kaygryn had moved south and east into the city to round up all the remaining human civilians. Because ZEN did not emit a warm body signal, it had been overlooked. ZEN did not think that the Imperials used VIs, which accounted for the oversight, but ZEN also did not like conjecture and did not dwell on the thought.
ZEN brought the railgun up and rested it on the lip of the firing shelf. There was no sight; ZEN instead had synced with the railgun’s sensor suite. There was no drone or orbital cover to assist, but that did not matter. ZEN pilfered what data it needed from the remnants of the human net. Despite the electronic warfare saturation, there was enough information there to give it what it needed. As for data on the target, ZEN had acquired it first-hand on NV-[Tier-One/Non-Sentient]-1509a/UN010: ‘Sophia’. The data files appended to Colonel Soto’s final looped transmission ranked a poor second against its own primary source.
It took a few minutes to locate the target. It was three kilometres away, moving at speed to the south-west. It had been marked as a probable by twenty-three different UNAF personnel in the last few hours. The height, weight and appearance of the target tallied with everything ZEN had seen first-hand.
ZEN lined up the rifle to take into account the spin of Cobalta, the speed and trajectory of the vehicle, the temperature of the air, the air density, pressure, wind, and a hundred other things which only ZEN could do at this range and with this weapon. The long barrel of the 701, lined with more and more powerful electromagnets than the SIR, had an effective range of ten klicks in its hands—against perhaps six or seven in those of a human.
ZEN did not let out a breath because it did not breathe. Instead, it ordered the trigger unlocked and pulled it back. There was no pressure, no force to overcome in the pulling which might knock the barrel off target at the very last second. It was an anticlimactic connection of electrodes which sent the API-85 down range in a squeal-bang of the sound barrier being obliterated.
The bullet was in the air for four seconds, more than enough time for the troop transport to bank or climb. But it was on a straight-line vector, the most dangerous form of movement in modern warfare that every Tier Three combat doctrine warned against. Well, the target was not Tier Three, but the best lesson was the one hard learned. ZEN recalled Captain Vondur having said that after New Carthage, but hadn’t truly appreciated the Terran aphorism until that moment.
It watched as the round struck the cockpit window of the aircraft and fragmented. Almost all of the round shattered on impact, but it was the payload—a viscous pink gel that burned hotter than thermite plasma—that mattered. A few drops, travelling well under the velocity required to activate Hasani’s personal force shields, latched on to the kaygryn’s fur, and ignited.
ZEN had often mused on the death of organic beings. When a ZEN was terminated while online, its consciousness simply returned to the net to be reused, its death another lesson in the networked recursive self-improvement loop that made ZENs the hive-minded killing machines that they were. With organics, it was different. Mindstates could be preserved, but ZEN was given to understand that this was both rare of itself, and that the states were simply a copy, a template, rather than the original.
Nonetheless, ZEN was well-acquainted with the nuances of revenge, and took some satisfaction in watching Executor Ghesovius Hasani immolate in a three-thousand-degree furnace that, incidentally, brought down the craft he was on.
‘Rest easy, Captain,’ ZEN allowed itself to say aloud, an uncharacteristic piece of learned human nostalgia that seemed appropriate in the circumstances.
Then it left the rifle where it was, climbed down off the firing shelf, and started walking.