“What made you leave the front line?”
Veidan speaks. “Orders. Captains Akcoda, Zillah and Wakefield have engaged GA forces head on at the frontline.”
Caufmann feels Decora speak. “Aren’t they outnumbered?”
Nothing changes in Veidan’s tense demeanour. “Aren’t we always?”
“Since we lost the Crucible everything’s going wrong,” Caufmann says feeling Decora’s hand rub against the side of his face.
Veidan’s image flickers for a moment. “The Crucible was…” he trails off looking back to the flashes on the horizon, “unfortunate. Costly.”
“How could a ship that size disappear?”
“How did you even know it was gone so early?”
“I don’t remember. I told Valhara as soon as it entered my mind. I’d only just gone for maintenance, and there have been gaps—”
“What did she say?”
Caufmann feels Decora shrug. “Cyranda station must have shot it down.”
Veidan seems to relax a little, “We didn’t want anyone to know until we were in a position to fill the vacuum left by suffering such a loss.”
He feels his head shake. “I just cannot understand why we ordered the Possession to intercede when the Crucible was under attack. We lost the ship and almost the entire crew and all for nothing. The Crucible escapes, returned to treat the Indigo Reign fallout, then vanished. Where did it go afterwards? It never came out of hyper transit.”
“Why is Valhara still here? It was a simple retrieval. What is she doing here?”
“She wants their general.”
Veidan looks to the blasts in the distance, “There may be nothing left when she’s done.”
“I’ll let her know you’re here,” Caufmann feels Decora switching channels in his head to talk to the wing commander.
“Not yet,” the lieutenant orders.
Something in Veidan’s expression changes but Decora lacks the emotional range to tell what it is, and Caufmann is mentally too far away to gauge it himself. Veidan speaks.
“I don’t know what to tell you, Nex.”
“It doesn’t matter, we have to make do with what we have.”
“No,” Veidan shakes his head and puts his hand up, “I mean I don’t know what I can tell you.”
Caufmann feels Decora’s shoulders tighten. “What?” Veidan never kept secrets. Normally.
“This isn’t just a war, Nex, everything we do is watched. There’s so much more than a political regime at stake for us. You understand that, don’t you?”
Caufmann can feel Decora’s hands moving, preparing medical treatment for the wounded CryoZaiyon. “Yes, Saifer.”
“We have to take care of our own future. I won’t say at any cost because I have my limits, but others do not.”
“You and Zillah have been on the front line for months. You need to let me bring the pair of you in.”
Veidan seems to ignore him. “There are steps that will be taken soon, and I cannot return to Iyatoya. Not now, but I will.”
“Where is this going?”
Veidan looks at him with an oddly resigned expression as if he’s just come out of maintenance, “The war office is pushing the House of Representatives to award more substantial sums to Godyssey’s budget tomorrow.”
“What for? Are we being reinforced?”
“Apparently. There’s a new system design prototype that’s ready for action. It’s called ‘HolinMech.’”
“That’s the system design that went haywire during the Montrialis test flight.”
“Yes, and responsible for the entire crew’s death as well as the loss of the ship itself,” says Veidan.
“There’s a new line then? That’s all?”
Veidan shakes his head. “We have to stop it before it begins. We smuggled a copy of the specs out and according to our diagnostics they’ll be little more than slaves. With resources at their current level it’ll be enough to produce a thousand per city planet-wide.”
Caufmann feels Decora frown. “Occupation?”
“The general consensus among those of us who’ve seen these reports leads that way, yes.”
“Then this war…” he trails off.
Veidan nods. “Is paving the way for automatons to keep the peace. Whoever owns the iron hand will own the world. Or in this case it’s the Thermosteel hand.”
“What are you planning to do about this?”
“It’s already happening. I’m telling you now because I trust you. I would have told you sooner but I’m not sure what to make of Valhara, yet,” he says, his green eyes blazing against the night sky with the explosions littering the sky behind him. “There will be reports of Thermosteel going missing in the near future. A lot of it.”
“I know about the missing stocks. Hundreds of metric tonnes are missing.”
Saifer looks at him curiously, “Valhara told you?”
“Candidly. She said no Thermosteel means no army.”
Veidan nods again, “She’s right. The next question is what happens to us.”
Caufmann feels the sides of his face pull up into a smile. “Maybe we should fight with the GA, after all.”
Veidan glares at Decora. “Have no illusions, there are no sides among humans for us.”
“I agree. We can’t trust our own side, we certainly can’t defect to a side that wants us all dead, so where does that leave us?”
“On our own, where we always have been. Our barracks are a prison, our state of being is conscripted, and we get lobotomised if we misbehave. We fight for Godyssey but they are not ‘on our side’ by any stretch of the imagination. Remember that.”
Caufmann can remember that he didn’t fully understand what Veidan really meant, but there is a lot he didn’t understand about the lieutenant. “Are you sure about all of this?”
“We’ve lost hundreds of androids, have you ever seen a funeral? A send off?”
“Of course not.”
Veidan’s clenched fist appears. “That’s what I mean. That’s binary coding telling you how to respond slightly behind your conscious will. We are thinking entities that are fighting a war that’s apparently for a free way of life. New medicine, cures for the maimed and crippled, replacement limbs for amputees and even new brain material for people who are too damaged to function. But we’re going to lose everything for this to come true.”
Caufmann feels Decora’s head shake. “I don’t know what to say.”
“And you don’t have to. Though one day, you will understand why,” he says taking a step forward, “I killed everyone in Iyatoya base.”
Caufmann is suddenly back in reality. The memory is sealed in his mind where it is once again fully accessible. He looks at the time display in his glasses to see that only two seconds have passed since he’s downloaded the file. He notices his gauntlet is flashing and he opens it to receive a frantic message from a bloodied Jellan Roths at the lab. The blood doesn’t appear to be hers. She’s calling his name desperately.
He manages to calm her down enough to get out a clear and terrible sentence. “They’re out, William! They smashed the lab to pieces!” When Caufmann asks whom she answers: “The Suvaco units. They’re out!”
13.
The Cold Heart
In the hours that follow Doctor Roths’ desperate call to Caufmann, the Suvaco units move through the city in an ever expanding spiral from the lab, killing only Horizon Military. Thus far they seem content to remain around the laboratory; a fact Caufmann finds most alarming.
Doctor Roths survived the initial emergence of the Suvacoes, and their mission to lay utter waste to the remaining security staff following Isfeohrad’s attack. Del has already flooded Caufmann’s gauntlet with text expressing a predatory eagerness to attack the nearest Suvaco, leading to Caufmann gaining Commander Croft’s consent to send Raston Squad to intercept one.