Red Zone - 8
A Novel
5
There was a brief pass-through, attached to such memories to give the recaller time to adjust. There was a broadening of his consciousness as if he were falling through a cloud layer, as attention-enhancing drugs and receptor drugs took hold. His ability to judge dropped. He felt the limbs and body of the ghost, it was Captain Bupathi.
Venky remembered him as a sleepy-eyed somewhat below mediocre officer, whose tanks were always just barely above the threshold of being reported, whose fitness always managed to straggle into the safe. But even this realization faded as his consciousness poured into the life that was Bupathi's. There was a small flashing red dot at the lower corner of his vision and a time readout. He felt hungry, urgently so. He felt his head swivel around, rather than smoothly letting the feed take him. It was painful when one's reflexes were too different in the same situation. Venky had to force his mind to a quiet state, knowing that that was the only way to absorb the flow of things.
Bupathi was at attention.
“Yaya. We can probably get ahead on the leave list if we go just a bit farther out, there are some tricks to getting more points and being ahead in the libs list.”
One of the other crew members laughed.
“No one knows Senthink better than Bupie.”
“Ya, we'll be having fun and someone else can be picking sand from engines.”
Bupathi's head jerked to look down at each of the men.
“I'm turning on the recorder again. So, calm down, it will all be in the record.”
The two tankers settled down visibly, and Bupathi turned their head upwards. He didn't have to look to swap out the faked conversation back to real the cording.
The familiar 360-view band of the tank was pouring out its waterfall of data, displays came and went. But unlike his own experience, Bupathi simply did not let himself soak in the feed. Instead, he checked a few things that popped, almost as if he was merely looking for alerts, and letting everything else flow away.
They were slaloming through a gully that had been freshly cut by recent ice flows, it had taken out the side of a crater, which was to their right. To port was a ridge, perhaps the lower rim of the crater. The sky was hazy with the “V” of bright stars that had the Centaur at its base, and Sirius and Canopus as its tips just visible. There was a great deal of ice and snow being kicked up.
“Nose up, I can't see. I can't see.”
“Yaya.”
The nose righted a bit, but still sh, let's were being thrown up. They were not going that quickly, but it was enough for the rocks and ice projections to their right to be a blur out of the corner of the Captain’s eye. The time counter's hundredths of a second whirred by, but the Captain was not the feeling urgency.
“Careful, must be some old ice ahead.”
What it was, was a patch of dullness. But to Venky's eye, it did not look like old ice or rock. However, it would not have raised an alarm generally. They skidded through it, and the counters noted the change and started to spectralize what was thrown up.
However, before Bupathi could turn his attention to it, he saw something that drew the attention of almost every human: a silhouette of a person, almost due in front of them. Bupathi didn't think further but turned the turret towards it.
“Try to hail that.”
“Hail what Bupie?”
“There's a person in front of us, turn the nose away, we don't have long.”
There was a moment, then the tank slipped up the crater wall to the right a bit, banking. There was a distinct feeling of G force, but not very much, or it should not have been discomforting. Bupathi's stomach gurgled and turned. His muscles tightened, but oddly, not in that coiling sense of the kill, but more as if he were riding along as a passenger.
Bupathy kept the turret more or less in line, but the crosshairs, that ancient institution, wobbed around the borders of it. He was neither fire-ready nor in any hurry to tighten his aim.
What followed next was a bit confused, Bupathi turned to look down at the two crew members, then looked up, by this point, there was already a flare of color spreading across the front of the tank's magnetic shield. Bupathi fired reflexively and missed easily. Not a warning shot, just a miss. Only after the shot had Bupathi been conscious of the weapon alert. Bupathi aimed more carefully, centering. Centering for what seemed half an age but was less than two seconds as the crosshairs floated incorrectly.
“Bugger.”
Bupathi let the laser loose, it vaporized a spiral around the target's head. Nothing to recover there, the figure slowly started to fall. Bupathi was disciplined enough not to fire again.
“Look around, see if he has friends.”
Bupathi then started to deploy out the anti-personal weapons, he fussed over their progress, rather than letting it happen. His head was too focused forward to notice what Venky could perceive out of the corner of the vision but could not command the head to turn and look at. Also, he had completely lost track of how much dust was being kicked up. It was just carbon. But exposed carbon would have been very odd here. The driver still was not keeping the nose up, kicking up a great deal of the dust. Venky realized that the meta-materials of the tank would be completely compromised by now, and the tank almost completely visible.
Bupathi started spinning the turret, keeping his focus down the barrel, he saw another figure, fired wildly, and the hit arrived as a side impact, but within the forward shield. The rattling of the tank and the feeling of recoil told Venky that the front shield was, somehow, compromised. Bupathi shifted the shields around 180 degrees, in that trick of lazy tankers to “sit on the bad shield.”
There was a dire alert. He noticed that the bio expert was ready with heavy stimulation, attention, and aggression modification, but that Buppie waved it off, half-consciously.
“Buppie on 6, on 6!”[1]
Bupathi had to turn his head all the way, and was a spectator to a third figure, again with some kind of handheld long tube-like weapon, the alerts were screaming, and the shield was gone. The shot came straight in, and the memory slowed here. There was a tearing feeling, and he could feel that Bupathi's lower half of his body was being sliced through by the ordinance, and there was a roaring blast of cold. The pressure of Martian air is high enough that it is unpleasant, but not lethal to have exdecom, and he could feel that reaching down Bupathi's throat.
There was a flurry of stars, he felt himself accelerating up, the field of view tilted back, and the displays grew to be of colored, meaningless, light.
He stopped the recall. He instinctively reached his hand to get some readjustment from the bioexper. His mind reved up again and felt considerably less one with everything. Instead, he focused like a hawk.
“What an idiot.” The words just escaped his lips with a force that came from a deep well of contempt. “I almost felt as if I were on the side of the ambushers for a moment.”
“My first thought.”
“That was a very professional ambush, with one person being a sacrifice.” The return to reality was complete, he hit a slightly different equilibrium.
“My second thought.” Tony smiled.
“It still doesn't exonerate you.” He focused his attention now on the Jovan, pouring his sight over every crease and furrow of the man’s slightly weathered features. Normal? Or a fashion statement. It was hard to tell, which was, itself a statement if it were artificial in any way.
“Shall we step through this?”
They rezzed up a display, it was from a constructed view outside the tank. Satellites were in short supply this far south, and their views were often oblique. There were various simplifications and gaps that betrayed the simulated nature of the view, including data shadows where grey replaced actual features. Both of the military commanders could tell that the information came from the center of the tank, and the center of the tank only.
Venky spoke: “The first thing is that there is no other sensor data. We have sensors scattered everywhere in the SouthSec, there are very few blind spots.”
“Maybe you can tell me why they were burning down that gully. We teach our tankers to avoid that kind of hell and heartache unless they know it is clear and have a good reason.”
“Yar, we do too.”
“So, my question to you is why would someone in your command do that?” Tony arched an eyebrow for emphasis.
“First to avoid sensors and be able to talk freely, in the recording they switched to recorded from a false monitor.”
“So, this officer was a first-class slack?”
“He was very good at interpreting the rules to the minimum effort.”
The Jovians nodded.
“Now let's see that patch. First, I didn't notice it.”
“It must have been some kind of nano-cloud.”
“So, whoever set this knew that tanks came through this gully. But I didn't see many tank trails.”
Venky nodded.
“This means that whoever set this knew it was Bupathi, trying to pad his point total and stay out of the way, or knew that the tank would come this way. Perhaps carrying contraband.”
“Was he known for it?”
“Bupie? Ohno. But he attracted the kind of people to him that would be. He was lax and looked the other way.”
The Jovians leaned back.
“So, first point, unless SouthSector is crawling with Jovi Jovian'ses, this means there is an awful lot of very specific information involved as humint.[2] Not our strong suit.”
“No, but still very far from innocence.”
“Not saying it is. You want to take me away to the brig after this, I won't object.”
The Jovians scrolled forward to the first hit.
“Now, was there a payload?”
“Clearly a shield killer. Perhaps combined with the nano-cloud.”
“Probably energy for the nano-machines. Simple payload. Not a weapon even, in any strict sense.”
Venky ran through the loop several times. He began to notice the odd curling, like turbulence in air, rather than an energy flow.
“Yar, the way it leaps along like smoke.”
“Again, while we have a good array of nano-technology, not our strong suit.”
“You could have had it made by others.” Since the amount of money Jove has is, by now, the cliché against which all other clichés are measured.
“Maybe.”
The Jovians took control of the view and rolled it forward again to the shot by Bupathi.
“Here is where I will tell you that no one from the Republics came up with this ambush. I am willing to be shot at, but no one could order me to be a sac in an ambush. That man, or woman, knew that this was suicide.”
“I will accept that it was not your military operation. But I still cannot help but think that you supplied the weapons.”
“Let me roll this one more step forward. We don't make shield killers Deesh. No point. Examine the weapons we have in your lockdown. I want to hit something inside a shield, I dial it up and punch it.”
“Anything can be ordered.”
“But most likely supplies would come out of back storage. Anything custom-designed looks suspicious. Whereas, surplus, could come from anywhere.”
“Perhaps. Finish making your case.”
“First, too much inside planning. Second, wrong tactics. Third, wrong weapons. The death blow is another nano-cloud attack with energy. It's a pattern.”
The door slipped open as the MPs that Venky had called for came.
Crunch. Crunch. Crunch. Wait, I didn't hear that, it must be a memory.
“That's very well, but you are going to the brig, and I am going to report a possible act of war.”
“You do what you must Venky, you do what you must.”
He offered his wrists up without any resistance and took the bonds. He walked out easily, whistling as he did.
He is either not worried or resigned to his fate.
Venky made contact with the MP.
“Make sure to be very careful, he is very good. Do an extra weapon scan now.”
After the affirmative came in Venky sat in the command chair, sank into it, and pondered the loop, as well as the data flowing in from the tendrils of his tank force. They should be at the site of the ambush soon. He would have data. Real data.
In his mind's eye, he pictured the blood spattered across the ice and wondered why a revolt on Mars. He also knew he had one other person to detain. He presses a button to communicate out.
“Kiesha Awaithi, bring her to the command center. Under guard.
The response came back to voice: “Affirmed, commander.”
He had to get ready to welcome the Infantry, and that meant in every detail. He settled into organizing the base and taking control of every subsystem.
Crunch. Crunch. Crunch. Wait, I didn't hear that, it must be a memory.
[1] From the by now ancient “clock dial” located on a vessel, with 12 o'clock being front, 3 right, 6 behind, 9 left, and so on. Each hour representing 30°.s
[2] Human intelligence.