KELLETH-9 COLONY // OUTER TRANSIT CORRIDOR, SECTOR 7
The drop was clean, with about four seconds of freefall from the transport's belly hatch and the atmosphere was thin enough to require seal but still thick enough to slow speed, the impact absorbers in Rae's boots taking the landing stress and distributing it up through the skeletal structure of his suit.
He was already moving before the dust settled, all eight of them were.
For the first thirty seconds everything was exactly as the briefing had described.
Kelleth-9's outer transit corridor was a pressurized tunnel connecting the colony's outer dome cluster to its central structure, two kilometers of enclosed walkway, which was wide enough for the ore transport vehicles that ran it twice daily with emergency seal doors every two hundred meters and lighting strips along the floor that were currently glowing green, which meant that the colony power intact and the drop point was secured, which meant the first objective was already complete before they'd fired a shot.
"Squad, check in," Doss said over comms. Eight voices, eight affirmatives.
"Sector 7 is ours, moving to the junction." She set the pace: fast but controlled, enough to maintain tactical momentum and still prevent the kind of breathless overextension that left units stranded. Rae took the right flank, it was the position he always took, the position Doss had factored into her flanking model years ago. Lira took the left, and the non-Ironborn members of the squad, Jem and four soldiers from the colony's security detail who'd been folded into the unit for local knowledge kept the center.
The transit corridor smelled like recycled mineral dust and machine oil and a sorting type of flat quality of air that had been processed through the same filters for too long, It was the smell of almost every Outer Reach installation Rae had ever been in.
The place felt familiar in weird ways, but then again all marginally survivable places tend to be familiar.
They reached the corridor junction in seven minutes without contact.
That was when the first "Error" happened.
Error is imprecise. The junction was clear, which was correct, the lighting was intact... which was correct. The security detail's local contact, a colony administrator named Tøs, probably in his sixties with a tired-face confirmed that the central dome was accessible, which was also correct. All of it was correct.
What wasn't correct was the quality of the silence (weird? Yes).
Rae had been in enough secured installations to know what secured silence sounded like, It sounded like nothing which was the silence of a space with no threats in it but this silence in the Kelleth-9 junction did sound like nothing in a different way, not the absence of threat, but the absence of everything that wasn't threat. No ambient system noise beyond the minimum required to maintain pressure integrity, no hum from the ore transport rails, no ventilation cycling... Like everything that wasn't absolutely necessary had been turned off and the silence that resulted was the error in a space that had been prepared.
But he didn't say this, he just ran the observation through his combat suite's threat-assessment protocol, which returned: AMBIENT PARAMETERS WITHIN ACCEPTABLE RANGE — NO ACTIVE THREAT SIGNATURES DETECTED.
He read the gap between what the suit assessed and what he assessed and added it into the category of things worth watching.
"Moving to the central dome," Doss said. "Tøs, you're with Carrow. Stay inside the Ironborn perimeter."
Tøs nodded in compliance, like a kid who had no other options.
They moved deeper into the colony.
The central dome was three hundred meters across and sixty meters at its apex, a pressurized bubble of transparent composite and structural steel that had been, two months ago, was a functional colony residential and commercial space for forty-five thousand people. Now it was empty, not even abandoned in a hurry, no scattered personal effects, no evidence of the chaos that emergency evacuation typically produced. Just empty space that looked like it had been slowly vacated with time and planning.
"Where did they go?" Brick asked. He was looking up at the dome's apex, where the structural supports cast angled shadows across the composite that the colony's artificial lighting, it was still running on automated protocols illuminated with the bland brightness of an office building after hours.
"The Conclave ran an evacuation," Tøs said. "Forty-two days ago, when the Vethkai advance came within two systems."
"All forty-five thousand."
"Thirty-eight thousand," Tøs said.
"The transit allocation was..." He stopped.
"Thirty-eight," Rae said.
"The remaining seven thousand were processed through..." He stopped again. Whatever administrative language he was reaching for wasn't coming.
"They were told transport would come, but it hasn't come."
Rael looked at Doss, she was looking at Tøs with a particular kind of expression she usually wore when someone had just given her information she wished they hadn't... because information you didn't have was easier than information you had and couldn't act on, she always said.
"Where are they now?" she asked.
"The lower residential sections. The sections with their own power supply." He paused.
"They've been there for forty-two days."
Doss was processing the information. The seven thousand civilians in the lower sections were not part of the mission parameters, the mission parameters were to secure the mineral processing facility and the mission parameters had not been updated to include a civilian rescue operation, and she had neither the transport capacity nor the extraction authorization to run one. Rae watched her complete her thoughts and watched her file it in the same category they were taught: between wrong, important or currently unactionable.
"We secure the processing facility," she said. "Then I file an emergency civilian extraction request. Tøs, how do we get to the lower level?"
He started to tell her.
That was when the second Error happened.
It came from the eastern sector of the dome, which the briefing had identified as a commercial district... markets, service facilities, the particular accumulation of infrastructure that grew up around people who needed things. The briefing had described it as empty, and while the briefing was correct about this in the technical sense, because what came from the eastern sector did not come from a person.
Rae's combat suite registered the incoming data at the same moment his own perception did: a shift in the ambient resonance of the dome's atmospheric processors, a frequency deviation that was below human hearing but not below Ironborn perception, that had the quality not of mechanical malfunction but of deliberate modulation. Something was using the colony's atmospheric infrastructure as a carrier wave.
He had his weapon up and was moving east before the threat assessment protocol completed its cycle.
"Contact east," he said.
"Non-audible resonance, atmospheric carrier. Vethkai communication signal."
Two beats of silence on the comms. Then Doss: 'All units, contact protocols. Tøs, down.' The civilian administrator had the presence of mind to drop without being told twice.
They cleared the eastern commercial section in four minutes... It was empty. The source of the signal was a small resonance emitter the size of a clenched fist, mounted to the interior wall of a market stall, broadcasting on a frequency that the briefing had not described as possible for a retreating rearguard to deploy, not because it was technically complex (it wasn't) but because deploying it required physical presence in the dome and physical presence in the dome required not retreating.
Rae crouched beside it but did not touch it, his combat suite took a recording.
"This wasn't left by a rearguard that was running," he said.
"No," Doss said. She was looking at the emitter too. "It wasn't."
From deeper in the colony from the direction of the processing facility, from the direction of the lower level where thirty-eight thousand people had left and seven thousand had stayed came a sound, not the resonance communication frequency or the atmospheric carrier. Something lower, something that registered through Ironborn perception had the quality of many voices speaking simultaneously in a register that was definitely not meant for human ears.
Not retreating, Coordinating.
The first soldier died forty minutes after they entered the central dome, he was from one of the adjacent units, a non-Ironborn infantry specialist named Hennis, twenty-six years old, posted to Kelleth-9's security detail eight months ago, who had spent those eight months doing administrative work in a colony that had been slowly emptying and who by all observable indications had never been in a combat engagement of any kind prior to today.
He was in the right position doing the right thing, but he was also in the wrong place in the wrong second and then he wasn't there anymore.
The resonance strike was silent that was the first thing, the absolute silence of it, the absence of any sound in a context where Rae's nervous system was calibrated to expect explosion, impact, the audible confirmation of violence. Instead: Hennis was in his peripheral vision then Hennis not in his peripheral vision, then the dust of Hennis settling in a pattern against the eastern wall of the corridor that Rae's combat suite processed as dispersal consistent with resonance weapon discharge and that his brain processed as: that just happened.
He kept moving, there was nothing else to do. The keeping-moving was not callousness, he had learned long ago that grief and action occupied the same neurological real estate and that if you needed one you couldn't have the other and that in a corridor with active Vethkai contact the one you needed was action. He archived Hennis in the same place he filed everything he couldn't process yet. The file was getting heavy.
"Contact south corridor," Lira said over comms. No affect. Pure signal. "Two units, Void-Step deployed, currently at seventeen meters. Engaging..."
The Void-Step was the thing in the briefing that had been described as not yet operational, not yet in the Vethkai advance forces' repertoire. As several months from deployment readiness, by Conclave intelligence's assessment.
Rae had time to acknowledge that the assessment was wrong before the first Vethkai appeared in the space directly to his left and was no longer in that space and was in the space behind him before his nervous system had completed the threat-recognition cycle.
The combat suite's neural override was faster.
It fired his left arm before he'd consciously decided to fire his left arm, torquing his body into the space the Vethkai had occupied half a second before. His elbow connected with crystalline carapace. The impact registered as force rather than pain (the pain suppression chip doing what it did) and the Vethkai's Void-Step cycle was interrupted by the contact, which left it in physical space long enough for the combat suite's targeting lock to complete.
He fired once, the railgun slug hit the carapace junction between the primary upper limb and the torso and the Vethkai went down with a sound like breaking quartz.
Three-tenths of a second, Rae had trained for that window specifically, he had trained for it on the assessment that Void-Step capable units would become operational within eighteen months, which was the Conclave's previous intelligence projection which had apparently been wrong by more than a year. He was, in this specific moment grateful for the surplus preparation.
He moved south to back up Lira, she had already finished.
They reached the processing facility's access corridor forty-five minutes later, reduced from eight to seven, Hennis was in the adjacent unit and not technically a casualty of Rael's squad but he occupied the same space in Rae's accounting, because the space where someone was and then wasn't was not altered by unit designation.
Doss had been on comms with battalion command for twenty minutes and had received the following confirmed intelligence updates: the rearguard was not at thirty kilometers north and moving away, the rearguard's current position was unconfirmed. The intelligence packet that had described their position as thirty kilometers north and moving away had been sourced from satellite overpass data that was now assessed as potentially compromised. The word potentially doing significant work in that sentence.
She had filed an updated operational picture. Command's response was to confirm the primary objective and advise that extraction timeline was unchanged.
She relayed this to the squad with a flat professionalism that meant she was also managing the information and not denying it.
"The objective is the processing facility and we're four hundred meters out. We complete the objective and we reassess the tactical picture from a secured position." A pause. "Questions?"
No one asked questions.
Questions would have been accurate, Rae had several but questions were not what the next four hundred meters required. What the next four hundred meters required was focus... the focus that came from setting aside everything except what was immediately in front of you, which was a skill the Forge had optimized in each of them and which they now applied to the space between themselves and the processing facility's access door.
Deeper in the colony, in directions Rae's combat suite tracked but his attention did not follow, the coordinating voices continued their low, infrasonic conversation.
Not retreating, not disorganized but patient and deliberate like a force that had exactly as much time as needed.
The processing facility access door was two hundred meters ahead. Then one-fifty, then the corridor bent south and Doss held up a fist, and they stopped.
From around the bend, the sound of the dome's deeper infrastructure and something else.
MOVEMENT...
"They were waiting for us to come here"