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Bureau (part 5)
Kelanie was in the control room of the NoSaNoOs Freighter that they'd hijacked, examining the mass of control-spaces that made up the communications panel. She had read everything that Tsiry-Feylen's knowledge-base had to say on the operation of NoSaNoOs equipment, and she thought that she could operate the comms system without Tsiry-Feylen finding out. She looked over her notes again, rehearsed the patterns, and then tentatively poked her fingers into four holes, one after the other. Nothing obvious happened; she poked a finger and a thumb into the NoSaNoOs equivalent of the enter key and the main monitor came to life, hissing with vertical streaks of video static. There were six particular control-spaces underneath the monitor that were concerned with adjusting the frequency of the receiver. She played with these for a few minutes, before discovering that they only altered the frequency over several pre-set channels, none of which were used by the Earth contingent of the NoSaNoOs. She looked at her notes again, found a reference to a `global frequency unlock', activated it. Now, (apparently), the six control-spaces underneath the monitor would range up and down the nano-gravitic band, the two outside holes changing the frequency rapidly; the innermost holes fine-tuning it. She was so absorbed in this that she didn't notice Kayren glide up behind her. The Pthalklin Ervae watched over her shoulder as she searched through the available frequencies for any signal from Earth. She found a few channels saturated with red and green vertical stripes, which she recognised as encoded Bythian military transmissions; finally, towards the upper end of the frequencies that the Freighter could receive, she found a band without noise, which meant that a signal was being transmitted on that frequency. A synthesised voice was counting down, in Tertiary, from somewhere around sixty-one thousand, speaking every two minutes or so. A few rapid calculations revealed that, if this was a countdown to the asteroids' impact on Earth, they had thirty-four hours left. She jumped nervously as Kayren pushed past her, moving closer to the control panel. "Like this, Kelanie..." Kayren's translator said. Three insects - each about the size of Kelanie's thumb - floated up to the columns, darting in and out of the control-spaces, occasionally flying back to the leaf-platforms that were arranged in a fringe just below Kayren's pineapple-shaped head to pick up new pheromonal instructions then flying up to execute them. The hissing of the untuned videoscreen cleared, revealing a two-dimensional display, red Tertiary text against a black background. Kelanie lifted her video-eyepatch, watched as the words blurred and resolved into the Anglic translation
This is a NoSaNoOs announcement. "That is the primary data exchange channel from Earth." Kayren explained. "It was."
Kelanie was in her battle-suit, drifting alongside the NoSaNoOs Freighter bolted to the outside of the Moridani base, floating a few metres from the hatchway which Tsiry-Feylen had blasted, tethered by a thin plastic cable. She had gone outside primarily to get away from the others, to try and sort out what was going on. From what she had seen, Tsiry-Feylen wasn't deceiving her about the imminent destruction of humanity. What could she do about it? Ninety years of existence under the rule of the NoSaNoOs had convinced mankind of the futility of opposition. The only thing she could think to do was to warn the government - what was left of it - somehow. She heard a tactful `click' over her suit phones as Marek drifted out of the hatch to join her. "Come back inside, Kelanie. I feel nervous with you floating around out here." She reached over and took his suit's hand in hers, tugged gently on the tether with her other hand, bouncing off the edge of the hatch as they passed through it. The black glass formed behind them as they settled to the deck; air rushed in through vents ranked along the bottom of the walls. Marek opened his suit, climbed out after activating a sequence that would command it to walk back to the docking bay by itself. The suit snapped shut, shuffled around them both and moved off. Kelanie, still in her suit, followed Marek back to the berth that they'd shared on the journey to the asteroid base. She stopped outside the round doorway, still lost in thought. Marek knocked on the front of her suit. "Come on out... I know you're in there somewhere." Abruptly, the suit opened, and Marek reached in, unbuckling the securing straps, lifting her out of the suit, trailing monitor leads and cables. One by one, he carefully peeled the contacts from her skin, kissing the places where they had been attached. She hugged him, one arm around his neck, running her hand down his back with sudden desperation, kissing him and dragging him into the berth, tears beginning to leak from beneath her tightly-closed eyelids. Her hand brushed the keys of her notepad, which began to play some soft ambient music, all crashing ocean waves, whale song and distant bass tones, as Marek stroked open the contact strip that held the front of her jumper together, pushing it aside, kissing her breasts and throat. She lay back on the mats which Marek had been sleeping on, breathing deeply, biting her lip from the effort of suppressing the despair she felt. Three large insects zipped into the room, circled over the entwined pair, and, scenting the pheromones, flew out again. Tsiry-Feylen was silent as she wiggled her fingers in the control-spaces on the flight-column of the NoSaNoOs freighter, which turned, backed away from the asteroid (which was still heading directly towards Earth), swung around it and overtook it. Kelanie, Marek and Kayren stood behind her, watching the view in front of the ship displayed on the main screen. Kendr-Saranaxio entered, wearing a battle-suit, Kayren swaying slightly to avoid the rhinoceros-sized mass as it passed. The suit cracked open, and Kendr-Saranaxio stepped out, shaking her legs. She said, using two of her voices, "We are taking a great risk..." "...but we have decided to use three-quarters of our offensive potential to divert as many asteroids as we can get away with." "There are three more stolen freighters arriving from other parts of the galaxy;" "We intend to lift as many humans off Earth as we can," "...before the Bythians can retaliate." "We are going in first, though, to pick up the cargo we originally intended to." Marek asked, "Weapons? I didn't think that humanity had any." Kendr-Saranaxio bared her teeth at him; he grinned back. "We have been stockpiling CCI missiles on Earth for the past nine years, but we aren't going in for them;" "We have also been stockpiling information; history, music, art, that sort of thing. That stockpile is our primary concern." Tsiry-Feylen said, tersely, in Bythian; Yl chuev chto ty valyf, li svayen'e valyf. Kendr-Saranaxio replied, "If it is a mistake, we don't think that there will be time to feel embarrassed about it." She turned to the two humans and said, apologetically, "My sister has been living safely on Millimillenary for so long that she has lost her sense of adventure." Tsiry-Feylen retorted sardonically, "My sister has been out gun-running in the asteroids for so long that she has lost her sense of proportion with regard to risk-evaluation." Kendr-Saranaxio held up a hand, extended one finger then another, withdrawing them both; the Kaelen antennae-signal that represented amusement. Tsiry-Feylen activated a bank of six monitors to her left, screens filled with vertically-run static that faded to reveal views along the side of the Freighter. Tsiry-Feylen explained, "Missiles. We will send them ahead of us, in case there are any Bythians lurking around. We will leave them in orbit while we go down for the cargo." Each view shuddered and changed in turn as the missiles were launched, accelerating furiously, the bright star that was their destination swelling appreciably as they watched. Kendr-Saranaxio said, "You humans can feel proud of those missiles; the drives were stolen from the NoSaNoOs, as were the CCI warheads, but control for each missile is provided by prototype artificial intelligences, developed on Earth." "...so you can begin to understand why the NoSaNoOs fear you... would you like to chat with a missile?" Kelanie, relieved that something was going to be done to avert the holocaust that she still couldn't encompass, grinned at Marek. "What can you say to a missile? Good-bye?"
How to: Show a Kaelen that you appreciate the joke it told you: The ExPort appeared deserted. A scrap of paper blew out of one of the gaping hangar doors, across the concrete oval of the landing pad. It fluttered, and then was swept aside as the NoSaNoOs freighter settled to the pad as softly as a balloon. A ramp extruded from the pad, extending upwards to the hatch that opened just as the ramp reached the ship. Two Moridani battle-suits ran down the ramp, across the ExPort and into the hangar, followed by two smaller battle-suits. "They're not here yet!" Kelanie scanned with her boom-mounted cameras, moving aside as Tsiry-Feylen ran out of the hangar, followed by six crates that floated ten centimetres off the ground. Kelanie moved into the hangar, which looked like it had been the subject of a raid conducted by heavy earth-moving gear; cubicles and desks pushed over to one side of the building, two gaping holes in the back wall. Crates were piled conspicuously in the bare centre of the floor. Kendr-Saranaxio was darting from one crate to another, checking labels, occasionally slapping a crate on the side. When she did this, the crate lifted from the ground and floated towards one of the holes in the back wall. Curious, Kelanie walked around to the rear of the hangar, and watched in fascination as the crates floated in single file to a landing pad, where they popped open, revealing a white metal sphere about a metre in diameter. The spheres rotated, aligning themselves with some invisible signal, and then shot off into the sky. Faint thunder of a series of distant sonic booms sounded from above. The last of the spheres executed an impossibly sharp right-angle turn just after it launched, darting off behind Kelanie. She turned, and seeing a distant speck in the sky, increased the magnification of her suit camera. It couldn't be a NoSaNoOs craft; it was moving too slowly. It resembled a bus, painted in camouflage green and brown, with two hazy circles wavering over each end. The sphere shot towards the machine, taking up a position underneath it. Kelanie ran back to the hangar, where Kendr-Saranaxio was giving loading instructions to the crates. "Someone's coming - I think it might be my friends." Kendr-Saranaxio slapped the last crate, which lifted, spun around and floated off towards the freighter. "According to the telemetry from the missile, it's an antique helicopter, human technology, three people on board. It has only shortwave electronic radio, which we don't have transceivers for." She ran back outside, to where Marek's suit stood open. Marek angled the suit back, staring at the sky, wrinkling his nose in distaste. "This air smells funny." he said. She beckoned to him as the helicopter approached, dipping unevenly towards the grass next to the freighter. The rear rotor cut out completely, dropping the machine to the ground from a height of about three meters, the chassis crumpling slightly as it hit. Marek snapped his suit shut and Kelanie ducked as the 'copter tilted over on one side, the rotors chopping into the ground, snapping off and flying in all directions, the craft shaking like an animal in the throes of some haemotoxic poison. When it had finally settled, the rear of the machine opened haltingly, then broke off. Three figures jumped out, freezing when they saw the battle-suits approaching. Kelanie shouted through her suit's external speaker, "Gen? Gaeren?"
Some ninety thousand kilometres away, a Bythian scout flew a parallel course to a roughly egg-shaped, nickel-iron asteroid, thirty-two kilometres along its longitudinal axis, turning end-over-end once every twenty-one minutes. Occasionally, the Bythian navigator glanced over the radar display, not expecting to see anything, but keeping watch all the same. Suddenly, it spotted three blips on the extreme edge of the radar field. At the next sweep, there were fifteen blips. It didn't waste any time; it thrust fingers into control-spaces, launching a volley of missiles, each no larger than a football, designed simply to get in front of a target and disintegrate, leaving a cluster of debris moving at high speed. As soon as the missiles were away, the blips scattered, changing course with a smoothness only possible for ships driven by NoSaNoOs impeller engines. The Bythian immediately sent an alarm to Threat Termination Control, but before it could specify the nature of the problem, the first blip had arrived at its destination, directly between the asteroid and the scout. It paused there for a moment, and the Navigator considered lobbing some more missiles at it when it vanished in a pinpoint of white light, a flare of vaporised rock spreading out from the leading shoulder of the asteroid. The navigator didn't bother throwing its arms up in front of its face, which would have been a useless gesture; its last act was to launch all its missiles in the general direction of the line of blips; three projectiles made it out of the scout's launching bay before a hail of asteroid-fragments riddled the ship, tearing it to pieces. The Bythian didn't survive to see the other fourteen blips reach their target and detonate, each pushing the asteroid several degrees off its course.
"Remember: military targets only! Be sure you hit nothing except bases, dumps, Tsiry-Feylen was in the freighter, talking with two other Moridani who were on their way to Earth. "It's going to be a <nightmare>," she said with a degree of disgust. "Kendr-Saranaxio is getting sentimental... anyway, it appears that there are almost twice as many asteroids as we accounted for, so by the time you get here, the planet will be a disaster area... the system will be swarming with Bythians... we're tempted to cut and run." "The first wave of diversion-missiles will have reached their targets by now; what is the latest projection with regards to Threat Termination finding out what's going on?" Tsiry-Feylen transmitted a complex, four-dimensional data-structure, showing how many of the eight hundred and ten scouts nurse-maiding the projectiles were expected to survive the detonation of the diversion-missiles and what the chances were of any of the survivors being able to report. "We agree... it is going to be a <nightmare>. We will have to arrange temporary living quarters for, how many?" "eleven hundred." "eleven hundred humans, on Triple-S and Beckett. We can't see that many humans co-existing peacefully inside NoSaNoOs freighters for more than a <week>." Tsiry-Feylen narrowed her eyes, grinning. "Maybe that is just what we need." She closed the connection, instructed her suit to take her outside, to check on the cargo loading. She saw the five humans sitting on the edge of the loading ramp, and waved as she passed, grinning to herself when she saw the looks of surprise on the faces of Kelanie's friends. Kelanie had been fielding their questions, assisted by Marek and the odd comment thrown in by Kendr-Saranaxio as she ran past, herding crates into the freighter. Gaeren Tuuri, a tall, thin neuter who had worked with Kelanie in the Bureau of Procuration, was describing the chaos that the NoSaNoOs withdrawal had produced. "It was like a mob of children who'd just been let out of school... what surprised me was the number of murders that occurred; you don't realise just how violent most people are underneath the thin veneer of civilisation..." he shuddered. Genesis, one of Kelanie's associates from her days in the AnarchArtist Terrorist/ Absurdist organisation, was scanning through the notes she'd collected during her stay on Millimillenary. He'd found a picture of the Bythian-hired assassin, the one they'd called the `Barber'. "This... up until three weeks ago, there were dozens of these Xenos all over the place, accompanied by squads of Bythians." Mileva Barker, ex-AV thief and street-gang leader, had taken a liking to Marek; Kelanie felt obliged to warn her, in low-level street talk, to be careful with him, "... or else you will have me to answer to." Tsiry-Feylen noted that the Hangar was now empty; she turned back to the ship, stopping at the ramp and opening up her suit. She resisted the impulse to bare her teeth at Kelanie's friends. "Unless you are expecting anyone else, we should go. It appears that we haven't been one hundred percent successful in stopping the asteroids, and our best estimates give us less than half an hour to get clear. We have successfully diverted approximately six hundred and fifty of the eight hundred and ten projectiles; the remaining few have been blown off course, but we can't be sure exactly where they'll land until they enter the atmosphere, because the Bythian scouts that survived the attacks have been trying to push them back on course." Kendr-Saranaxio joined them, opening her suit (and scaring Mileva by grinning broadly, scraping her teeth together and producing the sound which Kelanie had once compared to that of knives being sharpened). "Baylal-Delvoy-Kendr-Teff reports that there are some military transports on their way from Bythe Prime..." "... and you can believe that they aren't just stopping by to say `hello'..." "we have allocated the rest of the diversion-missiles to targeting the remaining scouts, so, with a degree of luck, all the asteroids will miss Earth, giving us enough time to get as many people off as we can fit into two NoSaNoOs freighters." Kelanie said, "Didn't you say that there were three freighters on their way?" Kendr-Saranaxio narrowed her eyes, abruptly closed her suit and ran up the ramp into the ship. Tsiry-Feylen hissed, exposing her fangs, the hands of her suit clenching and unclenching, and then turned to run after Kendr-Saranaxio. There was a moment of embarrassed silence. Marek hefted the case of hand-weapons which Mileva had stolen from the museum (in which they'd found the helicopter), and started up the ramp after the two Moridani. "Come on." Kelanie, the last one up the ramp, paused in the hatchway and turned to look at the ExPort one last time. A twinkling light far off in the sky caught her attention; she closed her suit, aimed a boom-mounted camera in the general direction of the light, magnified the view. It appeared to be moving downwards slowly and as she watched, glowing fragments broke off and spun away. She blew into the voice-activated microphone, and said, "Tsiry-Feylen? Can you see that object in the sky to the east of us?" There was a pause, after which the ramp fell away and the hatch closed, almost chopping off the end of Kelanie's boom-mounted camera. She stumbled back slightly as the ship lifted. "Kelanie, secure yourself... we have a projectile coming in on us." Tsiry-Feylen said. "An asteroid?" She instructed her suit to run back to the freighter's control room, passing her friends on the way there, while she tried to find an external camera that could show her the projectile in any detail. She could hear fragments of conversation, the choppiness of the voice-activated microphones becoming annoyingly obvious as she tried to filter some meaning out of the words: "-primary diversion was successful, at least it's not going to hit the residential area-" "-ing thing IS going to hit US, though, if we don't get moving NOW! Kelanie, are you secured?" She halted her suit's headlong rush, threw herself down to lie spread-eagled on the floor, hands and feet locking against the sides of the corridor. "Yes, I'm secure - what's going to -" She heard a thump, which, even through the walls of the ship, was obviously somewhere below them, followed by a jarring blow which hit her in the stomach as the ship was buffeted by the strike. Had she been standing at the time, she would have ended up at the far end of the corridor in a heap. The ship rocked like a leaf over a bonfire as she scrambled to her feet, stumbling down the passage. In the control room, her friends were clustered in a corner, while the two Moridani stood at the control columns, busily directing their dwindling supply of intelligent missiles towards their targets. One of Tsiry-Feylen's component personalities took the time to inform them: "It looks bad, children - the NAPAIsub for this system caught on to us quickly... they are definitely worried about you." Kelanie, still in her suit, went to a column off to one side, out of the Moridani's way. She patched her suit's display into the control column and sorted through the various views available from outside monitors, eventually finding one that showed the Earth below them. There was a turbulent grey field of cloud directly underneath them where the asteroid had hit. Her eyes widened as two more projectiles passed by, on parallel courses, glowing an angry red colour; one of them less than fifty metres from the ship. Something zipped across the screen, curving to track the nearer of the two asteroids, which were dwindling rapidly in the distance. There was an intense white flare, momentarily rendering everything in stark black shadows; when it had faded, the first asteroid, chunks breaking away, was drifting towards its companion. As Kelanie increased the magnification to keep them in view, they collided, the first asteroid breaking up into four smaller pieces, the second pushed off course. She opened her suit, sitting it down on its knees, staring at the screen as it tracked the asteroid until it hit, on the edge of the residential block about five kilometres from the ExPort. The view, which was already heavily aliased due to the extreme magnification, became completely obscured by dust, but she knew that anyone in that part of residential block would be dead. She looked up at Tsiry-Feylen, despairingly. "Isn't there anything we can do?" Tsiry-Feylen kept flicking her fingers in and out of the control-spaces, and replied tersely, "There is, and we are doing it. If you would like to help, go down to the secondary cargo bay and look for a crate marked vayasch cheyr. We'd hate to think that it got left behind."
Kayren, being more familiar with NoSaNoOs equipment, was able to get a patch from the multitude of transmissions that the Moridani were receiving from their smart missiles, scattered throughout nearby space. The humans sat in the cargo bay and watched as the Pthalklin Ervae expertly adjusted a multi-screen holographic display, the views changing every thirty seconds. Most of them were incomprehensible; some were streaked with the dot-patterns that the Moridani used for telemetry; others were blank, or obscured by static. Whenever they found an interesting view, they froze the display on that channel until the missile that was sending it was destroyed. Kelanie sat behind the others, in her battle suit, her hands clenched around the grips of the hand-manipulator controls. They were getting a fragmentary view of the carnage that the Moridani had been unable to prevent; huge chunks of rock ploughing into heavily-populated centres with the strength of atomic weapons, the shock waves knocking buildings flat in circles for kilometres around. She tried to treat it like some sort of documentary special-effect, but it didn't make her feel any better. After watching the eighth or ninth city being demolished, she slammed her suit shut and stamped out. Momentarily, Marek turned as if to follow her, but couldn't think of anything reassuring to say, and instead folded himself up behind a crate, his head in his hands. When she got to the control room, both Moridani were motionless, watching a single monitor on which telemetry information flashed past at a rate too fast for her translator to even register. "Tsiry-Feylen? What's happening?" No answer. She walked her suit over to stand between the xenos, opened it. Their attention didn't waver. Kelanie sat in her suit, trying for a minute to decide whether or not to interrupt them. She was about to speak again when both turned sharply to look at each other, baring their teeth and hissing; a display that almost made Kelanie's hair stand on end. Kendr-Saranaxio stretched, shaking her rear legs, and Tsiry-Feylen said, "We think we may have just halted Earth's NAPAISub. If we have succeeded, then we stand a chance of getting those nine hundred people off Earth safely." Kendr-Saranaxio opened a communications channel to one of the other stolen NoSaNoOs freighters, began chatting with another Moridani. Tsiry-Feylen took Kelanie aside, sat on one of their grey patterned rugs, her legs folding neatly underneath. "We gravely underestimated the importance that the NoSaNoOs placed on your extermination. We had been monitoring the communications between the NAPAISubs, but it appears that this exercise was planned privately between the local NAPAISub and NAPAI. We have managed to get both freighters down on Earth and fully loaded... we are now waiting for an opening before we can lift them to safety." Kelanie felt an ache behind her eyes, matched by a nervous feeling in her stomach, as if she were about to perform on stage in front of thousands of people. Tsiry-Feylen was watching her closely. Kelanie said in a small voice, "You've seen this happen before, haven't you?" "Six times. This is the third time we've been involved in an rescue. We have some idea of the anguish you are experiencing." Kelanie closed her eyes as the feeling got worse. "We don't cry, but if we could, we would." The semi-nauseous feeling vanished, abruptly replaced by anger. "I would have thought that you'd be used to it by now," she sneered. Tsiry-Feylen raised an index finger in warning. "We had friends on Earth, too. Don't, for one minute, think that you have some sort of monopoly on grief around here. Start to think that when you have seen this game played out a few more times, when you have seen more sentient beings killed than you thought existed. Start to think that when the NoSaNoOs are hunting for you, personally, and will kill anyone who gets in their way to find you. Start to think that when you find that you cannot trust anyone, or befriend anyone, for fear that they will be killed by the NoSaNoOs." Kelanie stared up at the alien for a moment, then broke the contact by abruptly shutting her suit and running off down the corridor. She found herself in the corridor where she had back-handed the Bythian, almost severing its head. She opened her suit, undid the securing straps and stood up in it, bringing her head level with a yellow stain on the white ceramic wall. Bythian blood. She reached out and ran her fingers over it, idly scraping some of it off with her fingernails. She heard someone - Marek, judging from the sound of his bare feet - approaching. She laid her hand flat against the wall, turned to face him. In the short time that he had known her, Marek had never seen her with an expression like the one she presented now. It was a look that conveyed icy, relentless resolve; the look of obsession. "We will give them good reason to fear us." she said. |
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