Chapter Eleven
Orkhana
Sienele hurried through the corridors, some of the more officious and tenacious of the local administration dogging at his heels as he did. He ignored their continual pestering about where he was going and why. They would work it out once the weapons fire started he expected… or they wouldn’t and it would likely no longer be his problem.
He would take either option, honestly, but the second had a certain appeal that brought an urge to smile to his face.
Sienele was an administration professional himself, but that didn’t mean he liked getting the documentation dance.
The Sentinels were in the lead at any rate and would certainly give more than enough warning for him and any of the local administrators who weren’t entirely brain dead to get to cover. He was privately betting on about half of them needing to be pulled down, but he might be optimistic he supposed.
Optimistic for what exactly, he wasn’t sure himself.
“Sentinel Kriss’ signal is just up ahead,” Sentinel Girr said back to him. “Be wary.”
“Wary? Why should we be wary? Envoy?”
Sienele ignored the nervous sound in the administrator’s voice, instead intent on what was going on up ahead.
Shocked silence fell, blessed silence in Sienele’s opinion, when the locals saw the trail of bodies and what looked like Alliance military specification gear littering the corridor as they passed.
“What happened here!?”
Sienele glanced back, “Have you never seen a Sentinel Operation, Administrator? Be silent. I do not believe this one has been seen through to completion, as of yet.”
The shocked and rapidly cooling Administrator clamped his orifice shut, staring in horror as he walked… seemingly against his will… forward through the carnage.
Sienele spotted Kriss standing up ahead and made his way over.
“Where is the Colonel?” He demanded flatly, uninterested in anything else at that point.
Kriss gestured down the hall, “That way, running reconnaissance for the operation. This facility has been rather impressively infiltrated, I must say. Never seen anything quite like it within Alliance borders.”
“Of course you haven’t,” Sienele snapped, exasperated. “We do not assign Lucians, let alone Lucian Sentinels to such problems. I require prisoners, Sentinel Kriss. We must learn more, find the next level of the conspiracy. Your heavy-handed solutions are not what is best here.”
Kriss shrugged, “Best or not, we are what you have.”
Sienele groaned. “And the Alliance weeps.”
He shook himself, “Alright, fine. Do the job. But take prisoners.”
“Should not be a problem,” Kriss admitted. “They are poor sport at any rate. Marginal soldiers, training on par with conscripts… well, good conscripts or bad volunteers. Take your pick.”
“I am quite certain I do not care. Just try to take some of them alive, preferably ranking officers.”
“Very well,” Kriss nodded. “Sentinels, we have a mission!”
The Lucians rumbled their agreement and checked their gear one last time as Kriss nodded forward and led them off.
Sienele sighed.
Damn it. The Colonel is still out there, doing only the universe knows what. I need to get her under control or orders involving her will quickly become… unpleasant.
He set off, amidst much protest from the locals, and followed the Lucians into the fight.
This time none of the local Administration opted to try and follow.
It was sad, really, but he rather found himself looking towards getting some peace in the midst of a battle compared to what he’d been enduring.
*****
Sorilla knelt at a corner, using her gun’s camera to scan around it without exposing herself.
There was some action going on, she could see, and it looked like the Sirhan soldiers were preparing to pull out. They were packing up what looked like computer systems, generally ignoring anything too big to carry, and ushering some other Sirhan who weren’t in uniform out ahead of them.
Definitely evacuating. Someone pulled the plug on this op, no question. Past time too.
She’d have ordered the plug pulled the second the investigation team stumbled onto the first conspirator. After that there was no hiding it, after all. Once even one conspirator was turned up, it was only a matter of time before the Alliance inevitably tore the facility to the ground to find every last trace.
The sooner they pulled out the more time they’d have to scrub as much evidence as possible of their actions.
She doubted they’d made the call fast enough, but that was better for her goals, so she wasn’t complaining. Sorilla sympathized with the Sirhan, rather quite a bit actually. They were running an operation she’d have liked to have been in on against the Alliance. Unfortunately, they appeared to be backed by the Ross, and she couldn’t just look the other way with them involved.
Through her career she’d not been in this situation, morally speaking, all that often but it had come up.
Sometimes you had to be the bad guy.
Sorilla opened up the communication channel back to Kriss.
“Kris, Aida.” She said simply.
“Go ahead Colonel, we hear you,” Kriss responded.
“The soldiers are cleaning and packing up, pushing what looks like maybe civilians out of the area,” She said. “Where are you?”
“My team and I are approaching from behind you,” Kriss responded. “Try not to shoot us by accident.”
Sorilla snorted, “You got it. I already have a bullet with your name on it anyway, just waiting.”
“No doubt,” the Lucian laughed. “We will see, I suppose, which of us is still standing when that time comes. Check behind you.”
Sorilla glanced back and waved the Lucians forward from where they’d paused at another junction. The team broke cover and quickly closed on her position.
“Welcome,” She told them. “I’ve counted about thirty or so more soldiers visible, along with at least twice that in civilians or, at least, non-uniformed personnel. Not sure what they were doing here exactly, but whatever it was someone called an end to it.”
Kriss nodded, edging past her to risk a glance around the corner.
He grunted after a moment and fell back.
“Agreed,” He said after a moment. “They’re clearly abandoning the operation. Pity, that puts us on a bit of a countdown.”
“Sienele is rather insistent that we take prisoners, Sentinel Kriss,” Girr reminded him.
“Yes, yes,” Kriss responded, sounding much put upon. “It will be of little loss here anyway. These are not particularly challenging warriors.”
“They’re not bad,” Sorilla said, shrugging. “Give me a couple months and I think you’d find some decent sport… or they would.”
Kriss eyed her balefully for a moment, then shook his head. “Do not tempt me with impossibilities, Colonel. No, this batch end here I am afraid.”
“As you choose,” Sorilla said simply. “So, how do you want to do this?”
Kriss considered that briefly, “With these numbers it would probably be best not to attempt a frontal assault if we can avoid it. Do you still have the facility map?”
Sorilla snorted, rolling her eyes under her helm, “It is not something I would delete, Sentinel.”
“Just being certain, Colonel,” He smiled thinly, an expression that was as close as Sorilla believed the Lucians got to being friendly, actually friendly, as opposed to being subtly… or, not so subtly, threatening. “Do you see any ways we could move around and take them unawares?”
Sorilla paused, again loading the map through her accelerometer implants, finding that just gave a far greater intuitive understanding of the material.
“Yes,” she said after a moment. “There are… possibly empty rooms that we can access that share walls with the target location.”
“Possibly empty?” Another Sentinal spoke.
“It’s a map, not real time intelligence,” She responded.
“Deal with the issue is and when it arises,” Kriss decided. “Show us.”
Sorilla nodded and dropped the top-down map to the communications channel through the hastily coded interface for Alliance signals. It took several moments to transfer, but in a moment the Sentinels were all looking at their own copies of the simplified diagram.
“If we take these rooms here, and here,” Sorilla pointed. “And coordinate, we can breach from both sides and catch them in a crossfire.”
Kriss nodded, “Workable. Very well, Sentinel Girr take half the team and go to this room…”
He tapped the screen, “I and the Colonel will go with the remaining to this one. Clear?”
The Sentinels nodded as one.
“Excellent. Move.”
*****
Sienele stopped, aggravated when he saw that the Sentinels had split up ahead of his position and were moving again.
What are they up to?
Sentinels were dangerous by their nature, both for their martial prowess but also for the fact that they seemed to have little to no true sense of self preservation. They literally lived for the fight, any fight, it didn’t matter. Combined with their martial skill and the sheer tenacious nature of the species in general, and there were good reasons why the Lucians had quickly been absorbed into the Alliance, not entirely of their own will.
Left to their own devices the species just picked too many fights for little to no reason. Better to give them reasons and keep them aimed at the enemies of the Alliance, all things considered.
There was a directness about them that he, personally, found refreshing… but that was hardly surprising. Most of his species were traders, as his cover implied, but he was all too often immersed in the diplomatic doubletalk of the intelligence community, where at best the friendly greeting you gave tended to be neutral compared to sincere.
The Lucians were at least willing to tell you to your face that they wanted to kill you.
Of course, it was a little disconcerting that, when they did, it was rather meant as a genuine compliment. Once you got used to that, they were actually mostly a pleasure to associate with.
Mostly.
In his experience they were a nightmare to keep directed while working an operation, especially one like this. If given more options, the last group Sienele would have taken for this type of scenario was a Sentinel squad.
However, that was not to be, so he would do the best he could with what he had.
Sienele located the signal belonging to Kriss with his tracker fob and noted with some satisfaction that the human Colonel was there with him.
One less to keep track of at least.
He turned and headed in that direction.
*****
Portal Ship
The conclave watched the preparations with growing interest, their focus increasing with each passing moment. The infiltration species were nearly finished with the preparations for withdrawal, and had already initiated several elements of sabotage.
The conclave could, at any point now, withdraw their support and leave the infiltration teams to their fate, but if possible, they would extract them in accordance to their agreement with the younger species. It was a rarity that they worked with such species, or put more accurately it was a rarity that a species was capable of working with them.
The infiltration species had some rudimentary sensory organs that allowed them to partially communicate on a similar level to the Ross. Not anywhere near as refined, of course, but with an impressive capacity for such an otherwise unimportant species.
Most other species were only ever able to truly communicate through a slow and tedious exchange of formulae that went through several different interpretation computers before anything remotely intelligible came out the other side. It was a slow, frustrating, and ultimately futile means of communication as it stripped all sense of context from messages and more often than not left both sides with no real sense of what the other actually intended to say.
Few in the conclave cared for such species as a result, and those that did were generally not looked upon well. It took a certain mental perversion to want to interact with those you had no hope at all of understanding, and in general the conclave much preferred to simply establish hierarchical dominance or, failing that, simply eliminate the problem.
Occasionally, however, that led to more problems than they started with.
The Sturm Gav, the species that had founded the Alliance almost three thousand lightyears closer to the core of the galaxy were one of those… and these humans, they were another.
The conclave was still split on the humans though.
A significant minority felt that the humans had somehow gotten lucky, and that had they continued the push they would have broken them entirely.
It might even be true, unfortunately the risk was deemed too great. When an entire Alliance battle fleet, supported by no less than four Portal Vessels with full access to space time formulae, vanished without a trace there had really been no choice. The conclave had been forced to call a halt to the advance until the situation could be investigated.
Unfortunately, said investigation had turned up nothing.
The area of space in which the fleet was last seen was unaccountably massive. It had been all but impossible to even locate the exact place in which the fleet had vanished and, though they believed they had been able to do just that ultimately, whatever happened had twisted local subspace into proverbial knots.
One of the local jump points was at the center of the mess, and the conclave assumed that had been the epicenter of whatever the human forces had done, but there was nothing there to find by the time they’d arrived to examine it. Spacetime itself was a degrading mess of entropic whorls, utterly annihilating the local jump point for at least several centuries if their calculations were correct.
Whatever happened was masked by that utter destruction below the quantum level of space and time, leaving the Ross entirely unable to even begin reverse engineering what had caused it all.
All they knew for certain was that a relatively small human fleet had caused an entire Alliance battle group, including four powerful Ross vessels, to simply… vanish without a trace.
That placed the human empire on a very short list of species the Ross were currently unwilling to push too far.
A list of two, to be precise.
Now one of the more prominent humans they’d had encounters with during and since the conflict was involved in unveiling some of the subterfuge the Ross had been implementing against the Alliance in the hopes of derailing some of the threat held over their heads by the number one species on that list.
It was almost enough to make even such as the conclave believing in the machinations of fate or karma.
Almost.
Truthfully, they didn’t even have words for the second, and the first… well that was merely the inevitability of the formulae… and, like all formulae, could be altered once one truly grasped the variables.
The question a very tiny minority were now wondering was whether Entropy was a variable they could… alter.
Silently, they watched and waited.
*****
Orkhana
They breached the room silently, the Lucian’s access to the facility network giving them the unlock codes for the door. With Kriss in the lead, the Lucians secured the room before Sorilla slipped in, letting the last Sentinel close and relock the door behind her.
It was an empty room, as her map had told her. Dusty, not even empty boxes or the like to clutter it up, and thus pretty much perfect for their current requirements. Granted, if it had been full of something, or someone, well they’d have had to deal with it in turn, but it was a relief to not be required to do so.
“That wall,” Sorilla pointed. “They’re on the other side.”
“Focused charge,” Kriss ordered. “Center it.”
The Sentinels quickly broke out what Sorilla recognized as the Alliance equivalent of a shaped charge. Strictly speaking she knew it wasn’t even close to what humans defined as such, the Alliance used their superior space time technology to twist the space around the explosion and redirect it entirely into the target but also not through the target.
It was terrifyingly effective, from her experience on the other end of such things.
They finished setting it up, taking measurements to ensure they knew the thickness of the wall they needed to go through. Everyone nearly lost their cool when a soft tap on the door startled them, however.
Kriss waved to the closest sentinel, drawing his own weapon to cover the door as the Sentinel slipped in to one side and then keyed in the command to open it.
Tension increased momentarily, then suddenly released as they recognized Sienele on the other side. Silently, the Intelligence Agent let himself in and nodded simply to Kriss. Kriss took the gesture for what it was and went back about his business without comment.
“Ready the breach,” Kriss ordered. “On my command.”
“Yes, Sentinal. On your command.”
*****