There was a reasonably modest yacht waiting for me. On board, I found two android crewmen packed in long-term stasis in the mid cabin. They were lying in what I supposed would be a fetal position for a human, but much more compact and angular. If not for the bright paint and reflective metal, they could almost be mistaken for supply cases. I activated one and, after it’d unfurled itself and completed a self-diagnostic, ordered it to launch the ship. Amusingly enough, it activated the other android to help complete the task. I left them to it and took a seat above deck. Ten minutes later, we were sailing into the English Channel.
The ship had enough provisions to last a crew of three two weeks. The galley was stocked with Peacekeeper combat rations and bags of distilled water. I’d never eaten a military ration before, but I tried one and convinced myself I could live with it for the two days the voyage would take me.
The sunny weather through the North Sea ensured the ship’s fuel cells never dropped below half capacity the first day. The weather turned further north, and I spent most of the second day below deck to escape the frigid spray of the swelling waves. By the time I entered the Norwegian Sea, the sky and water were equal shades of dark gray. Only the frothing waves gave me any sense of space.
I slipped into a drysuit and strapped on the rebreather once I reached the coordinates for rendezvous. I twisted the flat cap of the beacon, and it came free to expose a small contact plate and an LED. I pressed on the plate. The LED blinked twice and then held steady red. It was fairly anticlimactic. I checked the card again to make sure I hadn’t missed a step. One of the androids returned from above deck and folded itself into a corner of the space to recharge. It was soaked, and water seeped through the gaps in its fascia even fully collapsed.
The light on the beacon turned green. I assumed that had to be the clearance I was waiting for. I pulled my mask down over my face and checked the airflow. Satisfied, I stepped out onto the deck and was greeted by the sea as wave after wave battered the ship. I was relieved to feel nothing beneath the drysuit. The seas even this far north didn’t ice, but the waters here were nothing close to warm.
Timing my entry between swells, I exhaled then jumped from the ship. Slipping below the water, I realized how loud the surface had been by the contrast; it was suddenly calm and quiet, without even a heartbeat to break the silence. The light from above, weak as it was, fell away to nothing as I rapidly descended. I knew my augments were heavy, but watching the depth increase so quickly brought the abstract notion into crystal clarity. I was sinking like a stone. Like the Augmen that had once tried to kill me.
Below, I could see a green light within a massive silhouette of dark gray. So that was my target, a submarine. I’d expected an offshore facility or artificial island, but a sub made a certain kind of sense. The mobility gave it defensibility and a clandestine quality that couldn’t otherwise be achieved. It was the same rationale that drove the Arbiter Force to use small teams based on patrolling ships.
A few minutes later, I was standing in the airlock with water streaming down my body. The inner door opened as I pulled off my diving mask, and Raven Sommer was standing there with Andrew Jones.
“Tycho Barrett!” Raven beamed. “What took you so long?”
I unclipped the rebreather. “I thought I made good time. Nine hundred nautical miles in two days is slow?”
“You took a boat the whole way here?” asked Andrew.
I answered with a question. “How did you two get here?”
“We took a flight to Oslo,” said Raven.
I immediately understood. “Well, that wasn’t an option for me. I had an issue with StateSec after the attack, so there was no way I was going to get through port security.”
Andrew laughed, and Raven shook her head. “Well, I’m happy to see you in one piece,” she said. “Follow us. We’ve got a briefing with Andrea. I’ll show you where you can stow the dive gear.”
I shrugged off the rebreather and stepped out of the drysuit. The sub had more open space than I would have expected. There was room to stand, but equipment covered every bit of available space around us. There were placards and readouts in Chinese, with the occasional annotation in Cyrillic.
“What is this submarine,” I asked. “Peacekeeper fleet?”
Andrew answered over his shoulder, sidestepping a passing android crewman. “It is Federation, but no, not part of the terran fleet. It was a gift courtesy of the Russo-Sino Territories sixty years ago. Changed hands a few times before that. Now it’s a signals post for Sol Federation Intelligence.”
That seemed wasteful. “This ship looked massive from the outside, but you’re telling me it’s just a listening station?”
“Section 6 convinced the world this ship was decommissioned for parts ages ago. If anyone knew the Federation had a Kusanagi-class warship still in operation, they’d probably take offense. Maybe even want to start the arms race all over again, right?”
That was more in line with Sol Federation policy as I understood it. Offer the olive branch while clutching the knife. “Fair point,” I said.
We passed multiple bulkheads and went down a short flight of stairs, and we finally stopped at a rectangular room with a long, narrow table in the center. Thomas and Vincenzo were already seated. Andrea was leaning with her back against the wall. She wasted no time when she saw us, launching straight into the briefing. Raven closed the door behind us.
“Right.” Andrea stood up, took a deep breath, and looked at each of us. “We’ve just taken a serious hit. Our primary terran headquarters is burnt and off-limits from this point on to everyone on the field team. Over the next few weeks our support staff will sanitize the site, but there’s no going back. That’s the bad news. The good news is that we survived, and the Operator is working to cap the fallout as we speak.”
She turned to me. “Tycho, it won’t be hard to get the case against you closed in Bruges, but avoid going there at all for the next six months unless absolutely necessary.”
I nodded to show her I understood. Whether there were formal charges against me or not, it’s never a good thing to be known by StateSec. I was only too happy to stay away from Bruges.
“Before we go on, let’s run through what happened after the armory so we’re all clear. Raven and Vincenzo?”
“We got pinned down.” Raven’s voice was troubled, like it bothered her on a personal level to have been in that position. “The team we were fighting brought up a squad assault weapon, and we weren’t able to get a line of fire on them. They had adhesive grenades, but those were useless for the positioning.”
Vincenzo continued the story. “It was a stalemate, and it remained that way for a long time. If they had standard fragmentaries, they could have bounced around our cover, but instead they were trapped just like us.”
Andrea was pacing slowly as they talked, a sign of how much nervous energy was still coursing through her body. “I had a hell of a time clearing them out of the nest they’d established. Andrew and Thomas?”
Andrew replied, “We were guarding the Warwick node. But that’s a fairly fragile piece of equipment, so they couldn’t use anything heavy when they came for us. Just small-arms fire, mostly. Still, they threw a lot of guys against us. Our proxies were pretty much wiped out by the end of it. I think we had maybe two left by the time you got to us.”