VIPER One: Countervalue Read online

  It was not the news Governor Kenneth Yashego had been hoping for.

  /FLASH

  TO: UN-GOVERNORATE ARIADNE

  FROM: UNITED NATIONS SECTOR COMMAND GULL CREST

  ARIADNE WILL NOT BE DEFENDED IN EVENT OF ASCENDANCY ATTACK

  UN GOVERNOR AUTHORISED TO TAKE ANY AND ALL MEASURES TO SAFEGUARD CIVILIAN POPULATION

  DISCRETION IS ABSOLUTE

  /END FLASH

  He took in a deep breath and held it. He gave himself ten seconds. No, twenty. Thirty. His face started to redden. The atmosphere tugged at his lungs, trying to equalise the pressure.

  The air came out of him after a minute, exploding into his office in Government House. He’d been in it for three days straight, and despite the efforts of the climate control, the air was starting to smell a little stale.

  VIs, deep in the bedrock under Theseus, capital of Ariadne, had marked the flash for his eyes only. Now that he’d read it, the gencrypted missive self-terminated in a blaze of nonsense data. He could be tortured for hours by the provar, and they would never reconstruct the message.

  His office was quiet and dark, but getting lighter. It was only four-thirty in the morning, but it was summer for Theseus, and the sun rose early and set late. For the other UN colony on Ariadne, Minos, 11,000 kilometres south, winter’s grip still held.

  ‘Fuck,’ he breathed into the silence.

  There were two hundred and eighty million people living in Theseus alone, and another hundred million in Minos. Their UNAF contingent was a standing army of twenty thousand men, of whom about fifteen thousand were reservists. They were ill-equipped, and what they did have was old. Yashego knew; he had been the one pushing the demilitarisation policies for years. At one point they’d had ninety thousand men stationed on Ariadne, mostly professional soldiers on rotation.

  How foolish it all seemed now. How pointless; the political bickering, the constant, wearying talk of secession from the UN, the occasional acts of sedition. Hanging men, at Vargonroth’s insistence, as spies. Like many Outer Ring colonies, Ariadne had harboured a long tradition of distrust against the UN and its wealthy inner circle of industrialised Veigis worlds, and it was Thesean flags which flew from houses and in parks across the colony. Government House was the only building in the city to fly the UN standard, and then almost out of embarrassment.

  Now the provar were coming. With Ariadne’s paltry forces—barely a division of infantry and a handful of Harlequin tanks—they were as good as unarmed. The Ascendancy wouldn’t even have to land to kill every human being on the planet with total impunity. Had they brought this on themselves? Had years of constant complaining finally earned them their deaths? They were being kicked out like a rebellious teenager, left to fend for their own ungrateful selves.

  Yashego was a UN appointee, but he was a local, not some offworlder on a fixed four-year term, there just to keep a lid on things before being brought back in from the cold. There would be no cushy posting waiting for him on Vargonroth after he’d served his time in the sticks. He was a proud man, and a proud Ariadnian, even if his appointment was part of a transparent political drive to make them feel loved. But at that moment, he would have given his right arm for a fleet of UN warships and a few armoured divisions from MECHCOM.

  He took a few long, deep breaths. The UN had been fighting the Ascendancy for one month, but rather than burning out, as many pundits had predicted, hostilities were escalating dramatically. In the face of provari fury, the UN could do nothing but gear itself up to a total war footing; but in a civilisation the size of the United Nations, thousands of colonies across hundreds of worlds, and with the lumbering bureaucracy that went with it, it was a painfully slow process where the pace of galactic events was dictated in hours and minutes. Dozens of Outer Ring colonies had already paid the price for the UN’s complacency.

  And now Ariadne would be another one.

  He checked the time. It was 04:51, and the morning sky was red and bright.

  ‘Get me General Rhodes,’ he said aloud to the room. The Government House VI picked up the order, and within ten seconds a holo bearing the dour countenance of Benedict Rhodes was floating in front of Yashego’s desk. His pupils were dilated; the man, awake for thirty-six hours, was running military-grade stims.

  ‘Governor Yashego,’ Rhodes said, nodding once.

  ‘Ben,’ Yashego said, returning the nod. ‘It’s bad news.’