The next morning, Captain Paudel looked uncomfortable as she was escorted into the sitting room of the main penthouse suite of the Quaker City Pahilō Hōṭala. The dark-skinned local officer had shed her full power armor for a more subdued gray uniform, identical to the one worn by the slightly older man walking by her side.
The three mercenaries escorting them into the sitting room had given up any concept of “subdued” after a major attack on their superiors. Milani had doubled the number of ground troops in the hotel, taken over the entire top floor and put their soldiers in full power armor.
“Captain Paudel, welcome. I’m not familiar with your companion,” Kira noted, “but you did meet Commander Milani.”
The ground commander’s armor had been repaired and the dragon was currently sitting cross-legged on their chest, eyeing the two SDC officers warily.
“This is Commander Bueller, my senior engineer,” Kira continued. “He’s on the surface, working with your people, but I wanted to keep my people together until we had a better idea of what’s going on.”
She was confident that the Shadows had come for her—and they had no evidence that Brisingr had put out any kind of termination order on Bueller—but given that Bueller was unquestionably guilty of treason against the Kaiserreich…
“I’m not sure we have any good news on that point,” Paudel admitted. “But I’m only here for introductions. This is Colonel Tyag Sharma, the SDC’s head of Intelligence.”
Sharma was even taller than Paudel. Even with the dark coloring and lanky builds Kira was starting to associate with Samuels’s Nepali-extract population, he towered over his fellows.
The towering Colonel bowed over his hands to Kira.
“May I sit, Admiral Demirci?”
“Of course. Is the peace service still involved in this affair?” Kira asked carefully.
“They are,” Sharma confirmed. “But the decision was made that SDCI would take lead on this investigation, and I am coordinating a combined military and civil investigation.”
The two local officers took a seat and Sharma leaned forward.
“My best estimate,” he began slowly, “is that the attack on you involved between fourteen and sixteen individuals. We have retrieved two mostly intact bodies and achieved genetic identification of six individuals, all told.
“Thanks to the scan data and headware downloads you provided, we believe there were another six individuals in the airvan hit by your HVM,” Sharma continued. “The decision has been made, unsurprisingly, not to prosecute anyone for the possession of that weapon.”
“The jamming was still up after the second airvan was destroyed,” Bueller pointed out. “That implies there was a third vehicle, or that the jamming was far more expansive than Commander Milani estimated.”
“The jamming zone was approximately two point four kilometers across,” Sharma said quietly. “While your crash was in the zone, it did move closer to you, and then moved away before being disabled. There was unquestionably a third vehicle.
“We believe it was a ground vehicle, but there was enough traffic in the area, we have failed to identify it,” he admitted.
“What about the laser?” Milani asked. “That’s relatively easy to backtrack.”
“Indeed,” Sharma conceded. He laid a holoprojector disk on the solid wood table in the middle of the luxuriously furnished sitting area, and an image of an apartment building roof appeared.
It only took Kira a moment to identify what was out of place, and she swallowed a curse as she recognized it. It was spindly and fragile for what it was, but that was because it was supposed to be carried by human beings.
“It appears to have been fired by remote control, but we’re attempting to resolve the frequency to identify the source of the weapon,” Sharma said.
“It’s two point three six times ten to the power of sixteen hertz,” Kira said quietly. “High ultraviolet.”
“Admiral?” the SDC officer queried.
“That’s a Centaur-Sixteen Hall Pass,” Kira told him, then snorted at the ancient slang. “Or HPAAS,” she explained, sounding out the individual letters. “Human-Portable Anti-Aircraft System.
“It breaks down into two cases, each the size of a large personal suitcase,” she continued. “It can be completely automated or fired semi-manually.”
She shivered.
“In fully automatic mode, it requires extremely specific targeting instructions to keep the human hand in the loop,” she noted. Very few people liked automatic weapon systems of any kind, and most star systems and interstellar treaties included some verbiage around “hand in the loop” rules with regards to weapons.
Not least because AI warships given multiphasic jammers tended to never turn the jammers off to receive shutdown orders.
“So this a…” Sharma trailed off.
“It’s an Apollon weapon system,” Kira told him. “The Hoplites usually set them up around major events to reinforce no-fly zones. They’re not really designed to shoot down combat aircraft, but they’re more than sufficient to handle anything short of that.”
“That’s…useful to know, I suppose,” the SDC Intelligence officer conceded. “And consistent with the main issue we’re facing: nothing these people used came from Samuels except the airvans. The blasters we’ve retrieved are from the Sabuko System. The holoprojectors, as expected, are from Brisingr, but…body armor, sensors, everything is from somewhere different.”
It took Kira a few seconds to even locate the Sabuko System. It was a system sixty light-years around the Rim from the outer edge of the Samuels-Colossus Corridor, in the opposite direction from just about everywhere Kira had ever been.
“And the people themselves?” she asked.
“First-pass scans suggested locals,” Sharma noted. “Further digging, however, revealed all of the identities we located are false. Inserted into our databases via assorted cyberattacks. Our civilian identification systems are…not as secure as I would like.”
The Intelligence officer shrugged.
“My job is to be exceptionally paranoid,” he admitted. “Nothing in my system is as secure as I would like. But with false identities, even linked to their genetics, I can’t validate where the attackers were from.
“I’m guessing that, like with their equipment, they aren’t from Samuels. But…” He spread his hands.
“So, we know very little, is what I’m hearing,” Kira noted. “That doesn’t make me overly comfortable about letting my people swan around in Quaker City, Colonel.”
“Speaking for SDC Intelligence and the Quaker City Peace Service…” Sharma sighed. “I can’t blame you, Admiral. We have clearly demonstrated that we can’t support your security to the level that we feel is necessary.
“I would like to tell you that there is no way there is another cell of Brisingr Shadows on Bennet preparing to hunt you down,” he noted. “I would love to say that only two or three people survived the attempt on your life and they won’t have the resources to try again.
“I cannot, in good faith, say any of that,” he admitted. “In your place, Admiral Demirci, I would retreat to my carrier, where I was in full control of the situation.”
“That, Colonel, may not be an option,” Kira told him. “But it appears I will need to be far more careful what parties I attend.”
“And how we attend them,” Milani said grimly. “They almost certainly scanned our aircars as we came in. They knew which vehicles were ours, they knew our route, and they knew you weren’t in the first vehicle to head back.
“There was a fifty-fifty chance that they took you out with their first shot, Admiral. They guessed wrong—next time, they might not.”
“What are the alternatives?” Kira asked.
“Assault shuttle,” the ground commander said flatly. “You don’t fly in local aircars anymore. I understand that the job means you have to attend these parties, but I think we do fall back to Huntress and attend any further events by shuttle from orbit.
“Our shuttles wouldn’t even notice a light UV laser,” Milani said, gesturing at the hologram of the Centaur-16 HPAAS. “And they carry their own defensive weaponry that can vaporize a unit like that before it can hurt them.”
“I’m guessing the Shadows destroyed the AA unit?” Kira asked.
“It was rigged with explosives, detonated as soon as your car went down,” Sharma confirmed. “In general, the QCPS strongly prefers to have spacecraft come to the spaceport and have people move from there to their destination.
“Given the circumstances, though, I think I can convince the First Minister to order an exception,” he continued. “So long as you promise us one thing.”
“And what’s that, Colonel?” Kira asked.
“Please don’t bring any more weapons of mass destruction onto our planet!”